


Faded Circle

by lightscreener



Series: Brass and Shadows [2]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Pre-War, Slavery, Sticky Sexual Interfacing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-27
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-04 20:36:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6674629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightscreener/pseuds/lightscreener
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cybertron hurtles towards revolution, with high and low castes alike carried along by the current. A factory drone gets a new name, and a new purpose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Star That Fell In Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> A fic based on a Kaon/Tarn RP I ran with a friend. This is the continuation of Brass and Shadows, and it picks up right where BaS left off. If you want to know what's going on, I'd highly recommend you read that. There are some spoilers for MTMTE (especially issue #52) that follow in these notes, please proceed with caution.
> 
> The setting of BaS is based very loosely on an RPG called Exalted, and some background elements in the AU might seem strange or non-canonical, though hopefully I've been true to the characters and their personalities. It's still set on Cybertron, and everyone is still giant transforming robots, so no worries there. POV characters are Kaon (Overload), Vos (Killswitch), Ratchet, Drift/Deadlock, Optimus, Skyflow (an OC), and in this arc, Barricade.
> 
> Some ships have been mentioned in passing, most notably Optimus/Prowl and Ratchet/Wheeljack, though these aren't the main focus, and thus don't appear in the tags. Faded Circle and the previous story also have fairly large casts of OC's, who hopefully don't intrude on the story to much, but whom I use to avoid having everyone the characters know be someone canonically important. Homestuck-style chats are used to represent the comm, because I am still trash.
> 
> Finally, it's probably best to talk about MTMTE #52 a little, which... uh... let's say definitively sinks the Kaon/Tarn ship and IMO, more or less confirms the Tarn = Roller connection. While I want to stress that I don't think they're bad writing decisions, neither of those things is going to happen here. So effectively, I'm ignoring canon even harder than before.

Prowl went grey on the floor of the clinic. Wheeljack too.

To hear Pharma explain it to Knock Out, they had both been standing next to the window when the Township Array had exploded, and there had been nothing but glass between them and the shockwave. Ratchet had been behind his desk, which had partially shielded him, and it was what had saved his spark. Pharma himself had been flying back to Vos when Ratchet had commed him, and he'd just barely made it there in time, as Ratchet had collapsed from his own injuries while trying to revive them. He was in a coma, and between the combination of his injuries and near-insurmountable age, Pharma didn't know if he would ever wake.

Drift and Knock Out hadn't managed to get there until five days later. When the Array had exploded, the power had gone out all across Iacon, plunging the city into a calamity of riots and looting. Some kind of secondary blast had damaged the city's communication systems, and while short-range comms worked, everything else was down. Instead of trying to get anywhere they had stayed holed up in Sunbeam's fancy Seeker apartment. 

He spent most of his time hanging out with Flashback, and once he got used to new people, the minibot turned out to be great fun. He couldn't talk, but Sunbeam had taught him servo-signs, and he was teaching Drift. Sunbeam worked on a sculpture of Megatronus while Laserbeak rested on her shoulder, Knock Out studied and complained about being locked up, Click and Pixel played a game that Sunbeam had that involved some kind of board and different colored stones. Flashback started teaching him the rules (and beating him soundly in their first few games), but it was slow going, because he had to learn the signs at the same time.

On the third morning, the priests came and took Sunbeam to the Palace, 'for her own safety'. They ushered her out so quickly that Knock Out barely had time to say goodbye to her and promise that he and Drift would see her minibots safely to Academy. She still owned the apartment, Knock Out had explained to him, for a full quarter of the next year, so they had stayed there. There were amounts of shanix involved in all their deaings that threatened to scramble Drift's processor, so he didn't bother thinking about it.

On the third night, Knock Out had pulled him down into the berth with him. If he was lonely, or mourning his friend, or scared, Drift didn't know. He didn't care either. He was no stranger to interfacing for shanix, or shelter, or his next hit. Knock Out had spent money on him, cleaned him up, gotten him the new ID. This was just the next part of the transaction, and the old survival coding that had taken root deep within Drift's frame knew to respond automatically. 

Knock Out kept confusing it though, his clever hands questing over Drift's frame and stroking along transformation seams, his lipplates closing over Drift's and kissing them gently, his fields opening hesitantly, almost as if he was embarrassed to be so close. It was such an intimate gesture that it shocked Drift out of automatic responses. The last time someone had touched him gently was a distant memory, and he-- 

"What--" Drift said, trying to shake the thought out of his processor, "what the hell are you doing?"

Knock Out looked up at him, red-black optics blinking. "Interfacing with you? But maybe this was a bad idea."

"I think it was." Embarrassment wasn't the right word for what he was feeling. Confusion, perhaps. His fields were mingling with Knock Out's, wind and fire swirling together, enabling each other dangerously. There was a low hum through his processor, and his frame felt taut. Was it possible that he was charged up? Was it possible that Knock Out was just plain attracted to him? One mech wanting another, with nothing else between them?

Knock Out's claws stroked over his shoulders. "Do you want to stop?"

It was such an alien question. One that no one had ever asked him before. "No," was all he said, and he found it was true.

Knock Out leaned up, closing his lips over Drift's and kissing him lingeringly. There was a soft click as his panels opened and Drift expected to feel the heat and pressure of a spike against his abdominals, but Knock Out had opened his valve panels instead. The room was so dark that the soft glow of his red biolights and anterior node washed Drift with pinkish light, and as he broke the kiss, he stared down at it. 

Knock Out had a lovely valve. He'd had work done, no question, and even Drift's untrained optics could pick it out. The exterior folds were swollen and plush, glistening with lubricant, and just slightly parted. Lines of red biolights formed an enticing pattern, like racing stripes, that drew the optic to his anterior node. The node itself didn't blink, but glowed constantly, at a low smoulder, just like his fields.

"Is there a problem?" Knock Out asked, drumming his claws on the back of Drift's neck cabling. "You know what to do with it, right?"

Drift rolled his optics. "What the hell kind of question is that? I was just worried it was going to try and race me somewhere"

Knock Out was smirking, "I could give you directions, if you can't figure out how get onto the track."

"Oh, _please_."

Knock Out sat up a little, propping himself up by the elbows. "Maybe you should find something else to do with your mouth if you can't help with the sarcastic banter."

The sounded like an excellent suggestion to Drift, and he slid his lips down Knock Out's frame, grazing them over the seam of his chestplates. Knock Out shuddered, his claws pricking over Drift's plating. His array was throwing off heat, and his anterior node was delightfully warm as Drift lowered his mouth to it and sucked firmly. 

He was, if he had to admit it, much more used to spikes. Valves were trickier, which made spikes the equipment of choice for mechs looking to burn through some charge, or those who didn't care about their partner's pleasure. It was odd to think of a high-caste who didn't want to use his spike. 

Carefully, he eased a finger into the soft mesh of Knock Out's valve. It felt like oddly plush and incredibly soft, like the steelsilk blankets on the berth. More cosmetic work, Drift guessed, and he drew the finger along the first ring of sensors, igniting them. Knock Out's back arched up, off the berth, and Drift smiled to himself. He gripped red mech's leg and swung it over his shoulder, notching their armor together and listening to the roar of his cooling fans.

Pulling back a little, he ex-vented lightly over Knock Out's glowing node and the medic groaned and squirmed.

"Don't tease me," he hissed out, his claws raking over Drift's shoulders. He was probably pulling up paint, something that would distress him more than it would Drift.

In response, Drift switched the position of his mouth and his fingers, parting the soft folds of Knock Out's valve with his glossa, lapping up his lubricant as though it were sweet candy and savoring each taste. His thumb traced slow circles over Knock Out's node, to the same tune as the medic's grinding hips, and his pace went from languid to urgent. Eagerness so bright it was almost shameful lit into Knock Out's fields, and a slight change of position let him press the tip of his glossa to a deeper sensor, the act sending Knock Out into a thrashing overload beneath him. 

Drift half expected to be sent away, his task completed, but Knock Out hooked a claw under his chin and pulled him up, kissing him greedily. His servos roamed over Drift's frame again, this time down his midsection and between his legs, to his spike panel. Despite it being closed, the medic's hands were sensitive enough to find the invisible seam and trace around it. His spike was already so hard that it was pressing against his panel painfully, and the bare caress made it spring free. 

He should have been embarrassed to be charged up and interfacing like an adolescent, but he wasn't. Wanting someone who wanted him back was somehow simple and intoxicating all at once, and he wanted desperately to sink himself into Knock Out's frame and never leave it. Odder still, was that Knock Out seemed to want it too. 

\------------

"What," said Barricade as he slid down into the seat next to Megatron, "the hot mess of fresh fuck am I looking at here?"

The future Emperor's optics were fixed on the video Soundwave was playing, and he barely acknowledged his old friend and now, Decepticon recruiter. His fields were churning, like caldera of a volcano, power that was always threatening violence. "Hekatonkheires."

"Er, what?"

"A hundred-handed one. A mythological combiner. I didn't think there were any left. Not in this Age."

Barricade squinted at the video, even as it ended, and Soundwave played it again from the beginning. It was hard to pick the thing out, everything was a mess of black and red and blue, smouldering buildings and greying frames and spilt energon. "It don't have nearly a hundred hands, just like, six. And look, it's injured. One of it's arms is missin' at the elbow."

Megatron folded his servos together, watching intently. He still hadn't looked at Barricade, though Barricade wasn't offended. That was just how the mech was. 

"Good," he said. "What else did you notice?"

"Er, that you used to live in a different Age or something, boss?"

That got Megatron's attention, and he turned just slightly, one of his eye ridges raised. The question went ignored. "About the _combiner_ , Barricade."

"Oh, right." He squinted at the projection. "It's got a Decepticon badge, there on its shoulder. So, it seems funny that this ain't all over the fuckin' news. Figure the Senate would have a field day with that. How are they reportin' it?"

"No report." It was Soundwave speaking now. His voice was as emotionless as always and his fields imperceptible, even more so because of his proximity to Megatron. He played the video again. "Destruction. Power outages. Claimed to be explosion. Township Array."

"So... then this is one huge fuckup and they don't want no one to know about it?"

Megatron smiled, thinly. "You're learning, Barricade. I appreciate that."

"I'm tryin', boss. If the uh... Hakatonkerie is a Decepticon, we owe him a rescue, don't we?"

"Indeed we do." Megatron's nod was a barely an inclination of his helm. "If only to get some answers. Could you get into the city?"

"Considerin' that it's burnin' down, I'd say security's at an all time low." Barricade crossed his arms. "Need to be careful, need to get in and out before the riots end. After that, the police are gonna be out in force, lookin' for revenge. Oh yeah, and one more pressin' as fuck matter, is there something I'm supposed to subdue that thing with, y'know, other than harsh language?"

\------------

Ratchet was having a nightmare.

About what, and _when_ , his processor couldn't seem to settle on. He had lived for to long and there was so much to have nightmares about. That he had murdered Malleus, his Prime. That Sentinel was telling Perceptor to keep his optics online while he-- That Knock Out and Drift had been sold into slavery. That Cybertron was burning. That Pharma was gone, swallowed up by the fires. That the Ark had crashed. That Optimus had died. That he was on his knees, begging Megatron to take him to his berth instead of Prowl. That--

"Ratchet," Perceptor said, touching his arm lightly. "Are you alright?"

Ratchet stared. Perceptor was so _young_ , still an adolescent, still cooling from the Well. "I was," he said, and the vision was already fading, "just distracted."

This wasn't right. Perceptor was a professor at the Academy, a mech in the quaternary phase of his life-cycle.

Or was that just another part of the nightmare?

There were other mechs here. Embers and Lioness, Malleus' generals. Skygazer, the Prime's Air Commander. Balor, the Prime's Highlord and second. Relief washed over him in a wave. There was still time to fix things. They were still alive. The Age had not yet turned.

"I always wanted to see a room like this," Embers was saying as he stepped into Perceptor's office, his lips curled into a smirk and Lioness rolled her optics so hard they went completely white. "You know, all these holoscreens and datapads and parchments connected by a mess of red laserwire. Just once in my life."

"We were talking about Diamondback," Perceptor said, releasing Ratchet's arm and sliding back into a seat by the main console. There was click of keys, and he brought up a projection of Cybertron. The name was important, and Ratchet struggled to recall which parts were real and which were the dream. he had been here once, long ago. "However, it's not just the Diamondback Patropolus. The effect we refer to, colloquially, as the Night of One Billion Sparks is threatening the entirety of the Great Combination."

"How?" It was Balor, his fields authoritative and powerful, and he had the bearing of a mech who burned worlds in Cybertron's defense.

"The Titans are accustomed to providing bodies during Ignition within a certain natural limit," said Perceptor, his fields were weaker, but his tone just as authoritative. This was his current field of study, after all. "It's how Cybertron maintains its population. The problem is the creation of _so many_ new sparks at once. It's taxing them beyond limit, and at this point, fewer than three percent of the sparks generated within the Well are undergoing Ignition."

Ratchet frowned, asking the question even though he already knew the answer. "Where are the others going? The un-Ignited sparks. Are they returning to the Well?"

 _The Vaults_.

"You would... have to ask the Lord Prime about that, all I can say is that they aren't being returned to the Well. But it's worse than that, I'm afraid, the earthquakes we're experiencing are just the beginning. The effects are all building towards something greater--" He paused.

Balor frowned. "Something greater in what sense?"

Perceptor ex-vented heavily and looked between then before continuing. "The stress on the Great Combination is concentrated here, on the Diamondback Patropolii. If it continues much longer, it could result in his death, then his subsequent rejection and expulsion from the Combination."

There was a current of disquiet that ran through all those assembled. Even Ratchet was stunned into silence. He had expected Perceptor to make some kind of wild accusation when he said he knew the cause of the planet's current instability, but this... this was to much.

"The Patropolii can't die," said Balor, and there was finality in his words. "They have immortal sparks."

"The have _ageless_ sparks," Perceptor said in retort, as though he wasn't worried about his own. No one talked back to the Highlord. "They never spin down or burn out, but they _can_ die. Several of them did, when the Thirteen battled Unicron, and the survivors joined together into the Great Combination - Cybertron itself. It's myth, yes, but we can trace certain aspects of it to the present day."

"And," Balor said, "you're sure about this?"

Perceptor nodded. 

He turned to Skygazer. "Who's the Cityspeaker for Diamondback?"

"Sentinel, sir."

"Find him. _Now_."

Somewhere, in another room, Ratchet could hear Pharma and Knock Out arguing over him, feel the cool breeze of Drift's fields. He wanted, very badly to go to them, to not see this black day out to its inevitable conclusion, but the nightmare swept him along.

\------------

\-- threeSixty [TS] and noScope [NS] sent firebrightsOwn [FO] a message! --

TS: im scoping this room out  
TS: clear yo  
TS: next room

Lasersight and Grids were small. The little spark-twins were true minibots, classified as such by both size and weight. Killswitch wasn't the tallest mech on Cybertron, but he came close to average without his weight being factored in. He was the same height as most lighter, smaller cars, and reached shoulder height on heavier models. In comparison, Lasersight and Grids were just barely waist height on him. More handguns than rifles, despite Las' claims of 'rifle rumpus 4 lyfe'.

TS: hold on 2 ur spikes  
TS: i mean grip them firmly ma peeps  
TS: bc  
TS: its clear in here 2  
TS: hey fo  
TS: if ur surprise say something  
TS: lol  
TS: just a little humor there 4 u  
TS: i no u cant talk 2 us  
TS: kk next room

The power was out. It had been out for three days. 

The wall around the Prime's Palace kept them safe, so there was really no need for them to be patrolling their owner's house, but Firebright had ordered and so Killswitch had obeyed. He was, ostensibly, his owner's bodyguard and companion, even if Firebright scarcely paid attention to him outside of interfacing. Otherwise, Killswitch lived in a cabinet. It was opposite the cabinet where Lasersight and Grids lived. He had loathed them at first, but they were starting to grow on him. They hadn't had the advantages or specialized pre-Ignition programming he had, so their idea of patrolling was running from room to room excitedly and 'reporting' to him over the comm. It made him feel important, so he didn't mind, despite how nonsensical it was.

Killswitch couldn't speak to either of them - his vocalizer wouldn't respond to anyone but Firebright, but Lasersight had put together a way for him to 'talk' though a word-matching app. It was slow and frustrating, and it didn't exactly work here. Instead, he kept his comm channel open, and pinged it once for yes and twice for no. Technically, only his vocalizer was disabled, and he could respond to his spark's delight over the comm, but Firebright had ordered him to stay off it, and so Killswitch obeyed. 

Primus knew why, Firebright didn't care about him. His owner hardly thought of him as anything more than a fancy interfacing toy, and yet Killswitch still longed for his approval. For the chance to prove himself, to show Firebright how strong and capable he was. To be be acknowledged in some way, to make his owner proud enough to show him off.

He slid the door of the storage room closed and opened the next one. There was nothing to see here, but he walked a slow circuit through the stacked crates of energon, dataslates, and tarp-covered art pieces anyways. He sent out a scan that swept the room's periphery, it returned nothing, and he turned to go.

He almost made it.

There was a stain on the floor, just barely visible where the light from the hallway was filtering in. A slick of oils and internal fluids that someone had made a half-sparked attempt to clean up. Coming in, the angle had been wrong, but he could see it clearly now. Killswitch scuffed at it with one pede, it was dry, but it led back into the storage room.

TS: fo  
TS: u alright  
TS: grids and i r goin 2 take a v smol energon brk  
TS: u can join us  
TS: if u want  
TS: ur like r big bro rifle  
TS: the alpha rifle

He pinged the comm once, then twice, still following the trail. It led to a flat box that looked like it was used for cooling energon cubes. The seal at the top was broken, and Killswitch put one hand under the rim and lifted it.

Firebright wasn't there to ask him a question, so the scream died in his artificially muted vocalizer. Inside the cooler were a pair of minibots, grey with death. One, Killswitch didn't recognize, the other was Recall - the one who had tried to steal him. He could still remember the mech's panicking, wavering fields and the desperation in his grip as he had clung to his arm. Each of them had their panels torn away, spike and valve both, and their chestplates were resting ajar, the locks gone. There were spatters of silver here and there on the grey frames, transfluid. 

He slammed the lid shut, and then, as though he expected a different result, lifted it again. Firebright was--

He--

FO: Lasersight.  
TS: omp wtf is this  
TS: boot me up cold u can talk  
FO: Listen to me very carefully.  
TS: okay tell me ur words  
FO: You and Grids need to leave.  
TS: lol wat

\------------

Orion could see sparks. 

Ratchet's, white and constant and pure. Wheeljack's, silver-grey, with its orbiting green rings. Knock Out's, a wheel of red light, spinning in his chamber at such a high frequency that he had feared the young mech would have an arc-out. Sunbeam's, burning bright, the same orange-gold as Cybertron's star. Tumbler's, yellow and white, swirled like marbled glass. Prowl's, blue-black and filled with dark turns and hidden, churning depths. 

Drift's flickering, morning-blue spark, full of interlocking lights, like the constellations of some alien sky. The one that he had washed clean of death. A power he had not even known he had until he reached for it. 

At first, he had been scandalized. He hadn't been able to maintain optical contact with anyone for weeks. Even Prowl, with whom he had shared his frame, had never opened his chamber to him. Now his spark was bared to Orion if only he looked, and the intimacy of it was strangely one-sided.

Then, he had been curious. There seemed to be an infinite variety among Cybertronians, each spark was unique, and he wanted to see them all. Even the drones - whose sparks were said to be inferior, created by Malleus through foul sorcery instead of being Ignited with the Well - were beautiful.

Now, he was angry. If Sentinel shared his powers, he didn't know, but that the Matrix-bearer could cast half the population of Cybertron into slavery was abhorrent. Where a spark had come from was immaterial, and punishing the drones for Malleus' crimes could not change the past. 

It was the first thing he intended to change.


	2. The Guardians

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If Motormaster is your favorite character, he gets dragged a lot in this chapter. Sorry (...that Motormaster is your favorite character).

Electrocutioner wanted to say he didn't know how many he had killed, but it would have been a lie. He knew the exact number.

There was a part of him that _wanted_ to know. To keep meticulous records of each kill, like obscene trophies. Jolt, the technician who had been so fond of raping him. Aquarian, who had loved his laser drills. Swiftbolt, who had attached the anchor chains they thought would suspend him in place. When he had finally gone limp on them and there were no screams left to extract, Coil had been the one to bring him drones, so he could show them all he had learned from his erstwhile teachers.

A green jet, a blue car, a monoformer. Mechs whose designations he didn't know, but whose descriptions populated a dataslug magnetized somewhere within in his frame. It had belonged to Payroll, the friend he had murdered.

There was a green sun burning in his chest, a star so powerful that its light has mass. It was never going to spin down or flicker out.

...and he was never going to stop.

Some of his old jailers had done a foolish thing, and run. It didn't matter, they weren't prolonging their lives, only their torment. He would hunt them down later. To the last. Mortilus was an accountant, and everyone was going to pay.

The only maps he had of the facility were the electrical ones he had made earlier, when he was hooked up to the regulators, though he mapped it now as he stalked the corridors. When they had brought him here, he remembered the slope of the floor, they were underground. There was a worker cowering in one of the side rooms, and her struts snapped like wires gone brittle in the cold.

Still, there was some part of him that advised caution. He had called out to the other mech to give himself to him, and in doing so, given himself up. Their sparks were twined together, a circle without beginning or end. He had been ready to die here, in whole and in parts, but what was the point in it if escape was possible?

The worker was begging now, dripping black, oily tears from her cracked optics and interrupting him as he argued with himself. Pressing on her chestplates with one pede, he bore down until he felt her spark chamber crumple, and her begging stopped.

It was time to go. There was a whole city out there, billions of flickering, fragile lights with no dampeners between him and them.

He would have to be careful out there, he warned himself. Or he would get lightning paralysis. When they had first attached him to the Array, he had gotten it, and it was a normal side effect of the voltages he worked with. It wasn't so much that the first taste of atmospheric lightning was painful, but it was overwhelming. It stopped you from thinking or feeling, and you just rode the current as though time had no meaning. There were no dampeners between him and those billions of minds, and so many at once would be difficult to process.

Someone in the corridor took a shot at him, and it deflected off his armor, scraping away shavings of brass. He was already running, and doubtless all the mech saw was a blur of purple-red before he landed on him. It was Circuit, who liked to use needles and overload onto his plating. His hand punched through the mech's midsection, tearing apart his internals before gripping his spinal strut, to snap it.

"Circuit. You can't work anymore," Electrocutioner said, his voice exceeding all other sounds, both in volume and in the scope of its fury. The dying mech stared up at him, weeping, optics splintering under the strain. "Wait here, and someone will come by to offline you."

As amusing as it was to watch Circuit writhe on the floor, this was wasting time. He couldn't stay here, the world outside of his cell was bigger than he had ever imagined or feared. There were other mechs there, perhaps possessing enough strength to stop or kill him, but to what would no doubt be their chagrin also possessing a world big enough for him to hide in. 

Leaving Circuit where he lay, he turned and followed the electrical maps, always heading upwards.

\------------

Drift had left Sunbeam's apartment with Knock Out on the fourth morning of the Calibration. They headed to the Academy first. Knock Out had Pixel and Click attached to each arm, leaving Flashback for Drift. He'd never had a minibot attach before, so being linked was a new experience.

Mostly it was an experience that apparently involved transmitting loads of useless data. In a matter of moments, he'd learned price of imported marble, how far away he was from the Academy, and how a class on frame sculpting weighted its grades. Posting the datalogs to his feed seemed to make Flashback happy, so he didn't cut the little mech off.

The police were out in force, a fact that made Drift nervous - numbers like this usually meant they were going to raid the Dead End for runaway slaves or anyone they thought they could sell without protest. Knock Out breezed right past them, as though they were no concern, and Drift tried to emulate him. Every time he felt the prickle of an identity scan, he expected to be arrested or questioned, or thrown out, but Sunbeam's fake ID was as excellent as she had claimed. 

The Academy itself wasn't as fancy as the mansions and suite apartments in Jiara, but it was huge - even for a Cybertronian building. Though it was dormant now, and the ruin of passing Ages had stripped it down to a shell, the Academy had once been one of the great factory-cathedrals built by Solus Prime. It lay against the wall that blocked off the Palace District, and an extension of the wall surrounded part of it, as though the Palace was giving it a one-armed hug.

Drift _still_ didn't fit in, and mechs were _still_ staring.

To make things even worse, Perceptor wasn't even there. He didn't have a vehicle mode, and according to his assistants, the Dean had told him not to come on foot. He was staying at his private residence until the riots ended, and Knock Out had no idea where it was. The Academy in turn, didn't hand out the addresses of Professors to students. He tried to comm Sunbeam, and got nothing but static.

In the end, they had taken the minibots back to Knock Out's apartments in Meru, 'just until we find Perceptor'.

You had to be a noble to live in the shadow of the Palace, but anyone who had enough shanix could live in Meru. Drift had, in his ignorance, assumed that all nobles were rich. They were above even those in the highest-castes, and Pharma was clearly very rich (as well as being the only noble he'd ever seen in person), but this turned out not to be the case. Knock Out explained that there were plenty of nobles who were incompetent with money and basically bankrupt. They lived off the continuing beneficence of the Prime or other noble houses. It incensed Drift, when low-castes and drones were useless, they were thrown away. Why should the nobles be any different?

Knock Out's apartments were bigger than the clinic. Other than the Academy, it was the biggest building he'd ever been inside. there was an upper level, with balconies what overlooked the lower level. A garage for transports with a heated private room in case Knock Out wanted to recharge in alt-mode. There was even a fancy, huge washrack for his vehicle form. Like Sunbeam, he had a holoscreen twice Drift's height that took up most of one wall. Unlike her, his apartments were relatively neat and uncluttered, though there was an anatomical model and a stack of dataslates on the table in front of the holoscreen.

Laying around on the tables in the dispensing and eating area were piles of presents. Drift recognized them as the kinds of things Knock Out brought to the clinic as gifts for the staff and patients. There were cases of flavored energon and tickets to sporting events, toys, holovids, empty dataslates and ones containing novels. Some of them were just vouchers or money. 

Drift couldn't help staring. "Who's sending you all this?"

"Oh,' Knock Out's black-red optics flicked over the piles. "My sponsors. They pay me to go to school, and when I graduate, I'll be working for them."

"People pay you to do _nothing_? That ridiculous." There was a year's supply of high-grade energon sitting ignored in the corner of a room in Knock Out's apartment. It boggled Drift's mind. His tanks turned, he felt hungry and disgusted at the same time. "How many sponsors do you even have?"

Knock Out shrugged. "I don't know exactly, more than a hundred, certainly."

"Are you going to eat all of this?"

The medic seemed to sense where Drift was headed. "No," he said. "You can have it, if you want. Or we could, you know, take everything you can't carry down to the clinic. I'll help you sort it."

Drift was relieved. He wasn't exactly ashamed to admit that he had expected less from a high-caste.

There were spare rooms, though Click had her own room, and she showed it to him enthusiastically. Drift thought it was adorable that Knock Out had either bought or commissioned a little suite of minibot sized furniture for her. She had her own computer, her own holoscreen, and a shelf packed with dataslates. There was even a little desk, which was where she arranged Knock Out's affairs and study materials. The desk had a row of Blurr toys set up on it, all in various stages of transformation, and the ceiling over the berth had a poster of one of the racer's movies plastered to it. _Vigilante Payback III_ , apparently, though it was really just a poster of Blurr.

Later, when he was Emperor, Megatron would ban all of Blurr's movies, furious about everyone being so damned enthralled by an Autobot.

...but Click wouldn't be around to see it.

Drift set Flashback and Pixel up in one of the spare rooms, and brought them a chair to help them climb up and down off the berth. It seemed comfortable enough, if not as decorated and lived in as Click's room. He told them to comm if they needed anything, and they'd find Perceptor tomorrow. Or maybe, the Lord Prime was already in love with Sunbeam, and she would send for them soon.

He spent the night with Knock Out again, and in the morning the medic said he wanted to go down to the clinic and check on Ratchet. Drift wanted that too, and he took him there, expertly navigating the Dead End's back streets and avoiding the police and the worst of the rioting.

When they arrived, Knock Out and Pharma immediately got into a fight.

"What do you mean 'they're dead'?" Knock Out stalked around the table, practically chasing Pharma. "They both just upped and _died_?"

Pharma punched something into a dataslate and threw it to Knock Out, who snatched it out of the air and gripped it awkwardly. "It's all in the autopsy report. Massive trauma leading to spark death."

"But they were so young, and it was just an explosion." Knock Out stopped, and corrected himself. His optics flicked back and forth over the flowing Vosian script as it sped by on the datapad. "Well, _Prowl_ was young, Wheeljack was getting pretty old."

Drift couldn't make sense of any of it. Pharma didn't write in the simplified calligraphy he was used to, and Knock Out read the Vosian scripts so fast he might as well have been plugged in. Instead, he stood next to his... friend? Lover? Partner?

Instead, he stood next to Knock Out and tried to look supportive.

"Wheeljack," said Pharma dismissively, "was in his teritary life-cycle. Barely even middle-aged. You're a medical student, you know that."

Knock Out shook his helm, his voice low. "So unbelieveably old."

"Knock Out." Pharma crossed his arms and glared down at the red racer. "In case you haven't noticed, there's a riot going on. So, _sparkling_ , either make yourself useful or go back to the Academy."

"I came to check on Ratchet and I want to see him," Knock Out said, acidly. "...and then I want to see Prowl and Wheeljack's bodies."

"You can see Ratchet for one minute, he's in a fragile state and he's not conscious yet. The bodies, you can't see at all. I had to incinerate them." Pharma's glare looked like it could peel paint, but Knock Out glared right back, not backing down. He wasn't, if Drift had to guess, used to dealing with mechs in a higher caste than he was. "The clinic only has so much space, and there's none to spare right now."

"Ratchet's going to flip his slag when he finds out you set Wheeljack on fire. I mean it, Pharma. None of his slag is going to remain in an upright position. He still loves him."

"I can handle Ratchet," Pharma said, his voice high and cold, and his optics were pure murder as he shoved another dataslate into Knock Out's servos. "If you want to stay, get to work."

\------------

In the end, Barricade didn't go to Iacon alone. Megatron sent Motormaster with him, and at the last minute, the would-be Emperor had managed to rope his old friend Impactor into coming along. It made the drive complicated. Neither could drive as fast as he could, but they had both been built for near-constant work. In the end, they set a pace that was slower than he was used to and compensated by barely stopping to rest. Impactor wasn't a Decepticon, or even a real supporter, and that complicated things too. His addition had come out of concern for Barricade's safety and Megatron's request, so he tried not to worry to much about it. Besides, other than make him uncomfortable, what was the miner going to do?

Motormaster talked incessantly about the combiner. He wanted to know all about it. Where it had come from. How strong it was. How mechs combined with each other.

"How many bots are inside it anyways?" Motormaster asked. They were sitting around a table in a rest stop the first night out of Kaon. It was an ugly little place, dimly lit, with the walls cracking and the protective coating coming off the tables. But the engex didn't have grit in it and the server was cute, and that was about all Barricade needed to be happy.

Barricade swirled his drink. "Megatron and Soundwave think there are at least twenty, if it's that strong."

"I could do that," Motormaster said, bragging. "Find some other mechs and make them submit to me. Walk around combined all the time. Did you see that thing? Imagine how strong _I'd_ be."

"So pretty much," Impactor said, "you didn't listen to Megatron at all when he fucking explained it to us?"

"Yeah, fuckaft, it don't work that way." Barricade rolled his optics, because this wasn't even the first time they'd had this conversation. "You need to have a special connection, unity of purpose and spirit. Like when you do a sparkmerge, but it's even more intimate."

"...and it's not like anyone would want to sparkmerge with your ugly aft." Impactor narrowly avoided laughing into his drink. "You're more the 'wham, bam, thank you ma'am', type."

Motormaster leveled his gaze and glowered across the table at them. 

"As if he'd say 'thank you'," Barricade said.

"Come to think of it," said Impactor, "probably wouldn't be a 'bam' either, just the 'wham', and then he'd be in recharge."

Barricade burst out laughing so hard he toppled one of the bottles on the table, and Impactor joined in. Motormaster rose up out of his seat, towering over both of them. He was the tallest of their little group and he thought that made him the biggest, but Impactor was only barely shorter and the miner probably outweighed Barricade and Motormaster put together.

"You wanna fight?" he said, his gaze bright and dangerous as he stared down at Impactor, who didn't seem at all bothered.

Impactor looked up at him, fingers tapping idly on the peeling tabletop. "Yeah, buddy, I do." If Megatron's fields were always threatening to erupt into violence, Impactor's weren't all that far off. To Barricade they felt like dangerously faulty earth, ready to collapse and swallow the mech.

Motormaster seemed to be weighing his odds, and he didn't like what he came up with. He rolled his optics and stalked out.

Three days away from Iacon they had met up with Runner, though that wasn't the little mech's real name. He was one of the Midnight Runners, ubiquitous couriers who were owned by the Word-of-Mouth company. With their black paint, dark grey protoflesh, gold biolights, and polished badges, they were striking while somehow being instantly forgettable. 

They had a reputation for reliability and loyalty, and also, virtually to the last, they worked for Soundwave. 

Every secret that hit their datanet, every whispered word or secretly couriered bribe or salacious bit of gossip made its way down through the net to him eventually. Some were Decepticon loyalists, and some were just supporters or friends. This praticular Runner was a two-wheeler, and he'd said he could lead them into the city through the Denas District, an abandoned construction project. At first, he addressed Impactor and Motormaster, until they none to gently informed him that Barricade was in charge.

Runner looked him up down, his gold optics blinking and incredulous. "You're a drone."

"I own myself," Barricade said. "Got screens ta prove it, and I'm in charge."

"Decepticons let a drone order around Forged mechs?"

"Only the dumbest, ugliest ones," Barricade said, grinning, and Impactor's fist clanged off his shoulder as he burst into inappropriate laughter. It was really the only kind of laughter Impactor did. Runner laughed too, and immediately attached himself to their little group, at ease with them now. Motormaster mumbled darkly to himself and said nothing else.

With Runner in their midst the little convoy going was even slower. He could have had any of them eating dust in a pederace, but the drive to Iacon was a marathon, and he was a smaller mech with smaller tanks. They set a higher speed and stopped more often. Runner seemed to be infinitely curious about him, wanting to know where Barricade had come from and how he had come to own himself.

"Nothin' to tell," he said. "I came from Tincoral, near the coast, out by the Pole of Water. I worked for United Aluminum, guardin' the trains."

"You a Water mech then?"

"Earth," Barricade said, "and my stars are the Guardians."

"Air," said Runner, gesturing to himself in proud reply. "And the Messenger led me here. How'd you get to be free?"

"Not much to tell. One day the owner of United Aluminum came by to inspect the trains, and another mech paid someone to shoot him. I shielded him, got my stupid aft shot four times. Made it out with my spark and got half a year's salary and my screens out of it, so fuck, probably worth it."

"Hn." Runner stroked his chin. "Can't say I'd take a shot for the mech who owned me. What did you do then?"

"Everythin'. Drove up the coast. For a long time, I just drove. Didn't know what to do with myself, but half a year's salary don't last as long as you might think. After a while, I worked for anyone who had work. Guarded more trains, provided muscle, cleared scrap and hauled it. Whatever kept my tanks full."

"Sounds hard."

"It was," he said, thinking back on it, "but I'd never go back to bein' owned. I could live hungry, I could live with a lot of things, but I couldn't live with another mech ownin' me again."

There were others on road, coming and going. Runner stopped to talk to everyone who would talk to him, and Barricade liked to go with him. He was a Decepticon recruiter, after all, and he always liked to look for potentials. Impactor was quiet. Motormaster complained, sometimes to himself and sometimes to Impactor - who thankfully, didn't have a single operational fuck to spare for what he thought.

They met a trine of Seekers, walking towards Iacon, a strange enough sight that Runner insisted they stop and question them. The trineleader, a mech named Stormwalker had been so badly damaged she could no longer fly. She and her trine were going to Vos to hurl themselves -still living- into the Well, in the hopes of being reincarnated together. To Barricade, it seemed like a preposterous waste of life (and the days when he would look back on the time that he thought three lives was a preposterous waste and marvel at his naivety were coming), but one look in her optics told him that no reasoning was possible. He never forgot her face - serene and beautiful and oddly calm, and sweeps later, he would ask Starscream about her. 

To Vosians, or so Screamer had said, the loss of flight capability was like dying, and there had even been a point on one of the city's floating platforms constructed solely for the purpose of throwing yourself from it. The slopes of Well below it were littered with hollow struts and broken grey frames, thousands deep. Starscream hadn't known her personally, but he would tell Barricade that she and her trine had done the right thing.

A mech named Orion bought him a cube of high-grade while they were sitting together and chatting in a rest stop and Barricade liked him instantly. He was on leave from work and he was going to Kaon, to see the pit fights. Or so he claimed. Barricade doubted it, not because he thought the mech was a liar, but because Orion had kind optics and open fields, and he didn't think the hauler could sit by during the bloodsport they made in the arenas. While they were drinking, Barricade told Orion that while he was in Kaon, he should check out the Floating Lantern Pavilion, a brothel. The mech looked like he needed to get laid.

Motormaster, apparently annoyed by this camaraderie, said he wanted to fight Orion.

"Wouldn't do it," said Impactor. "You'd go down so fucking fast that every buymech in Kaon would be taking notes."

Runner, who against all odds, had decided he liked Impactor, burst into hysterical giggles. Barricade had to get between them and order them all back onto the road to break it up.

Two days out they met one of the temple prostitutes from Nyon, traveling with his entourage and bodyguards. His name was Topaz, and Runner fell in love with him instantly. When they decided to catch a recharge cycle near a shelter for vehicle modes at the side of the highway, Barricade caught Runner counting his credits. 

"Topaz is the most beautiful mech I've ever seen," Runner said, excitement in his tone. "You ever see a buymech look like that?"

"He ain't a buymech," Barricade said. "You can't buy him and have him for a night or two. He's a temple prostitute, he's just for the priests, and even then, only the special, real pious ones. His valve is holy, or some dumb slag like that."

"Who's teaching you all this?"

"Megatron. Either way, Topaz don't need any presents. The Temple takes care of him."

It didn't stop Runner from pulling two credit sticks from his subspace to buy Topaz a gift from the rest stop, a tacky statue of carved glass. Barricade feared the little mech sorely needed the money, but was a little relieved when Topaz accepted it gracefully and in return, asked Runner to deliver a short message to friends in Iacon, paying him up front with two gold sticks covered in prayer-glyphs - currency from Nyon - that looked like they might go for close to what he had paid for the statue.

A few hours up the road Runner pulled them over into a little huddle of shacks where mechs were selling badly distilled engex, cheap paint, stickers, and other cheap crap. They were only a day out from Iacon, and it burned Barricade's aft to see mechs living in poverty when up in the Capital, Senators and high-castes were drowning in energon and calling themselves holy for it. Runner led them to a booth in the back, where a mech was selling hand-hammered iron charms, and traded the two gold sticks for a handful of charms. He offered one to Barricade. 

"I ain't gonna wear that," he said. "I'm a Decepticon. No religion."

"Denas District don't care if you're a Decepticon," said Runner, his tone authoritative. "The dead aren't quiet there. It's an evil place. You came from Tincoral, but you ever work on the ships?"

He didn't see what that had to do with anything, but he nodded. "Sometimes."

"You offline on the ship, they throw you overboard, right? No funeral."

"Yeah." At times, Barricade had wondered what the Pole's floor had looked like, but it was probably better not to know. Even on a safe voyage, three or four mechs usually went under, more if the ship was big. 

"Same thing in Denas. Worker died there, they tossed him down, into the foundations. Worker couldn't take it anymore, he jumped." Runner lifted up his courier's badge and fixed a charm underneath it, then put the badge over it. "One day they all jumped. All together. The company couldn't afford more, and it went bankrupt. Couldn't afford to dig the bodies out. Couldn't afford to finish the district. They're all still down there."

 _Great, fantastic_. "There ain't another way in?"

"Not if you don't want to get filmed and ID'ed a thousand times. The city's been on lockdown since the Array exploded. The Enforcers are everywhere during the day, grabbing anyone they think they can sell. We can go through Denas though, there's no one there, and from there to the ruins of the Township Array, and we can find your _jouten_."

It was a word that Barricade didn't know. " _Jouten_?"

"Unicron," Runner said. "Incarnated in a mortal form."

Impactor snorted. "Unicron's a fucking planet."

"Which is why he needs to come as a _jouten_." Runner offered up the charms again. "Soundwave showed me the video, that thing is the Brass-Skinned Dancer, the Dark Architect, I know it in my spark."

Barricade still declined the charm, so did Motormaster. Impactor took one in the end, saying that a mech could never have to much luck on his side and he shouldn't worry to much about where it came from.


	3. The Spear

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This got so long I had to break it up into two parts. Barricade goes off to fight a monster on his own, Killswitch makes bad choices.

Down in the darkness below the world, Megatron had taught Barricade how to read. Other than his freedom, it was the most valuable gift he'd ever been given.

It was not a function that he had come online with. Barricade was a bodyguard, heavy and thick, with a processor to mimic his body. Pre-fabbed soldiers didn't need to read, and the lack of special programs meant the company saved shanix on software and a mech couldn't go snooping through his owner's personal affairs. Even after he'd been freed, for dozens of solar sweeps, the cost of energon had come before the cost of tutors. 

Once, after a good season of hauling scrap up and down the coast and laboring on the ships, he'd counted his savings and had something left over. He'd driven two days into the city and inquired around about a tutor, then sat uncomfortably in her office, waiting for his first lesson and thinking about how he'd find work there. 

The tutor was a slim two-wheeler with blue-green paint. She had taken one look at him, seen the dirt and road dust on his frame, his pitted and scarred servos, and she had him thrown out. _Drones_ , she had said, _are unteachable_. Hadn't returned his money either. Barricade couldn't so much recall her face as the look of disgust that had twisted across it. He hadn't tried again.

When Megatron had said he would teach him, Barricade had protested at first. He was to old, and the word 'unteachable' was still swirling around in his processor. Megatron had simply told him he wasn't, and Megatron was as unmovable as a mountain, and they had continued with the lesson.

They had started with the Covenant, and in his secret spark of sparks, he still loved it.

There hadn't been much time for religion on the West, in Tincoral, or out on the ships. They worshiped Lunarus Prime there, both chiefly and with no respect for the order or placement of the Soul of Water within the hierarchy of the Primes. Lunarus was a fickle, mercurial thing. The quintessential Water-aspect. The flippant trickster who had cheated Mortilus. When the Pole dragged comets out of space so the water inside could be refined for Cybertronian use, you prayed to Lunarus that one wouldn't hit your ship before it hit the water. When waves four times the height of a mech swept over the docks, you prayed to Lunarus that you wouldn't get dragged down. If you went offline on the bottom, Lunarus would steal your alt-mode. Or so it was said.

The gods had always seemed distant and cruel to Barricade, but the ones written about in the Covenant were different. Once the words took shape in his processor he had read the document from beginning to end, and then read it again, delighting in every adventure.

How Solus and Augmentus had a love so great that they forswore all others, and they had made oaths, 'until the world ends' - the ones mechs still used when declaring cojunx endura. How one of Unicron's chiefest Void-born souls could not be knocked down, and yet was only vulnerable to attack on the soles of his pedes. Lunars had seduced him with a dance, tricking him into joining in and lifting one pede. How Micronus had rushed beneath its heelstrut and slain the monster with a single blow from a poisoned blade. How Delta had journeyed into hermitage and returned with the secrets of sorcery. How Megatronus and Valourus had come up with the Demon-Blocking Battle Patterns, to defeat Unicron and the armies of Void-born he had unleashed on galaxy. How the Black God's Guard had been founded to stand eternal guard over the corpse of Unicron, the Beast With A Thousand Maws and now, the Dark Planet. How the Matropolii and Patropolii had joined together to shelter the wounded Primus and become the first and greatest of all combiners, Cybertron itself.

Also, there was a fuckton of pornography in the thing and that was pretty great too.

It was engex, Megatron had explained to him when they finished it. For the mind, instead of the body. It asked nothing of the reader, save faith. And blind faith was simple, a mech needed to rise above it, to elevate himself.

Barricade never went back to reading the Covenant. Megatron's gift to him was far to precious and he wanted to respect it, even if what Megatron _wanted_ him to read was boring and conceptually dense. Instead, he read adventure and romance novels, sensationalist newspapers and tabloids, and the fiction that amateur writers composed about Blurr's movie characters on their personal feeds.

He was, he suspected, not the high-minded mech that Megatron was.

Before they left Kaon, he'd read in the newsfeed that priestesses from the Black God's Guard had come to Cybertron and they were staying in Vos as the personal guests of Prince Starscream. Just to read their names, which were Soundshatter and Tailwind, made Barricade feel as though some great adventure was reaching out to him from across time. In that moment, he was more grateful to Megatron than ever, he would never have understood or even cared about them if he hadn't read the Covenant. The Black God's Guard! An Order founded by Solus and Augmentus Prime before Cybertron had even existed!

Motormaster had ruined it. Grinning and pointing up at the screen, he elbowed Barricade and pointed up at Soundshatter. The priestess wore a steelsilk veil around her helm that descended down her body and covered parts of her frame. Barricade longed to ask her why and wondered if the question might be rude. 

"I'm gonna fuck that one," Motormaster said, "the one with the wedge wings."

"No you're not," Barricade said, laughing, but remembering the look of disgust on the tutor's face when she laid optics on him. He could never talk to the priestesses, they would give him the same look. "Jets don't play in the dirt."

"Don't care where she plays. I'm gonna take her when we burn down Vos." Then, seeing the look on Barricade's faceplates, he must have sensed he wasn't talking to a kindred spirit. "I'm kidding, you dumb fuck."

Barricade had, at the time, thought seriously about throwing himself out of his chair and killing Motormaster. The hauler wouldn't have been the first mech he'd offlined, or the second, or the third, but he didn't. Motormaster was joking, was what he told himself. He was part of the Cause. He was a Decepticon loyalist. Besides, how would he explain it to Megatron? Or the authories, if someone bothered to call them. Motormaster was Forged and Barricade wasn't, the Enforcers wouldn't care where the truth lay.

Later, he would wish he had done it. It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.

\------------

"Pharma's lying to us," Drift said, watching Knock Out's delicate, beautiful hands as they combed through a stack of dataslates on Ratchet's desk.

"Figured that out all on your own, did you?" His optics flicked up, glowing like coals in the dim light of the apartment. "Watch the door."

Knock Out's tone stung, and Drift wondered if the medic knew when he was being a snob. Probably not, but as instructed, he did keep one optic on the door. Pharma had assigned Knock Out work that the mech considered 'beneath him', but Drift doubted the elevation of the work mattered. The moment Pharma had turned his back, Knock Out had slipped away to rummage through Ratchet's personal files.

Drift watched idly. "What are you looking for, anyways?"

"Financial records." Knock Out put down a stack of slates and started on another one. "Ratchet was terrible with money, just terrible, but I'm guessing I can find out a bit more of what Pharma did with those bodies."

"He said he had them incinerated."

"Yes," Knock Out said. "Prowl's a lost cause, but not Wheeljack. They probably would have paid for his frame, and if we're lucky we can find out who took him. Maybe they haven't put him through the smelter yet and I can--" He trailed off, not seeming to know quite what the next step was. Knock Out was very young, Drift realized. Younger than he was, certainly. "Well, I can at least have a look and maybe have some answers for Ratchet when he wakes up."

"People... pay for frames?" It wasn't the only question Drift wanted to ask, but the other ones caught in his vocalizer. _Do you think Pharma killed them? Is it safe to leave Ratchet here?_

"Sometimes, if they're in good condition. Most parts of a frame can be repurposed. The t-cog, fuel pumps, tank lining - those stay good almost indefinitely. Even protoflesh can be sloughed off melted down for synthetics and grafts if you can get to it quick enough. If you're Forged, most smelting companies will pay to strip the orichalum off your chamber." Knock Out talked about it like his experience with corpses was strictly technical, and at the moment, that was true.

"So then, you think Pharma is selling organs or something?" Drift glanced over his shoulder at the door, expecting the sleek, dangerous jet to burst in, but he didn't.

"Nothing that unsophisticated," Knock Out said. "Do you want to go and see a race with me? I have tickets."

"Way to shift gears without the clutch." Drift thought of the books of tickets laying untouched in Knock Out's dispensing room, and he wondered how many real friends the other mech had. 

"I'm serious."

"About Pharma, or about the race?"

"Both."

Drift wasn't sure if Knock Out had only asked him because he had sensed the sting of the barb he had made a moment ago, or if he was making his own version of a peace offering. If he was saying, ' _I'm not embarrassed to be seen with you in public_ ', or something like that. Primus knew he wasn't embarrassed about what they did in the berthroom.

"Yeah, sure," he said, pretending he was watching the door as he stole a glance at Knock Out. He was an attractive mech, beautifully built and sleek, fun to spike. Equally clever with his hands and his mouth. It was all going to come crashing down sooner or later, once Knock Out got bored of slumming and ditched him, but considering how well he'd made out already, why not let it ride?

\------------

TS: okay killswitch  
TS: i am getting prepare  
TS: i made a resume do u want 2 c  
TS: gonna do right by my sib  
TS: find a v good partner 4 us  
NS: For Primus' sake.  
FO: I want to see it.  
TS: i new u would

With some apprehension, Killswitch flipped up the top of an energon cooler and extracted four cubes. He would have taken more, but Lasersight and Girds had limied mass and thus, limited subspace capacity. These weren't the first cubes he'd stolen. He'd taken some the day before and stashed them in the room he was supposed to be living in, to see if any one would notice. No one had.

No one was even watching to see if he was in his cabinet. 

TS: hello we r experience rifles + spark twins  
TS: we r looking 4 a partner  
TS: bc we r spark twins we cannot be separate  
TS: we hope u will b able 2 take care of most if not all of the walking  
TS: also we dont have a gender so no pronouns plz  
FO: It's perfect, Las.  
FO: I know you'll find someone, but first, you need to hide for as long as you can.  
FO: Firebright might search for you.  
FO: You can't stop when you get outside the Palace wall, keep going. Leave Iacon. Go to Kaon, or Tarn.  
FO: Find someone really big and dangerous to attach to.  
NS: Killswitch, Las and I talked about it, and we'd like you to come with us.  
NS: It's obviously not safe for anyone here.  
TS: yes plz  
TS: we have come 2 think of u as a big bro  
TS: but also as the sparkling we must take care of

His valve ached and did his cheek, where the protoflesh was blue-green and bruised. Firebright had taken him to his berth last night and the jet had not been gentle. As disgusting as it was, some small part of Killswitch was grateful, even elated. At least his owner was finally paying attention to him (even if it was only because none of his friends wanted to leave their estates during the 'crisis'), or maybe it was just the programming his creator had poisoned him with, telling him to enjoy it.

When his frame responded to his owner's caresses, it revolted him. When he offlined his optics, he still saw the little gray frames, twisted in on each other, their panels torn away. Was that was Firebright intended to do to him? Or to Las and Grids? He wasn't sure, being so valuable and rare gave off the finest illusion of a safety net, but he doubted it would protect them if Firebright got bored or desperate enough.

Every time Firebright's fingers had traced over the seam of his chestplates or slid into his valve, Killswitch had tried to squirm free. Worse still was that it hadn't discouraged his owner. If anything, Killswitch's token resistance had only encouraged him. Firebright had taken him roughly, finishing the night with a sparkmerge that had left Killswitch feeling like someone had scourged the plating off his chamber and poured acid over his internals. It had finally extracted a scream from him, despite his master's orders to stay silent. 

The punch hadn't hurt nearly as much as the merge, he'd barely even felt it. Until the morning, he'd thought Firebright had just knocked his helm to one side when he overloaded. Now the protoflesh was swollen and bunched under his optic, colored an angry blue-green. He'd seen it in a mirror he'd passed and written it off. Firebright was going to kill him once he found Las and Grids missing, what did a little bruising matter?

FO: I can't leave.  
FO: Sorry.  
FO: I got you some energon. It's not a lot, so you'll need to make it last.  
TS: ok  
TS: we can do that thing

He had to stay with Firebright, his programming reminded him sternly of that, but he didn't think it would be to hard for Las and Grids to slip away. They were small and quick and their owner paid even less attention to them then he did to Killswitch. Whenever he had guests, Firebright would inevitably drag out his precious, expensive, Adamant-series drone to show off. More inevitably, Killswitch would end up servicing his master's favorite guests, usually other jets. Some part of his processor, one that Killswitch was starting to identify as deeply sick, was secretly thrilled to be getting rid of Las and Grids. Once they were gone there would be no more competition for his owner's affection.

Not that Firebright had ever shown him any affection.

He stowed the cubes in his subspace and closed the lid of the cooler without slamming it. It was dark in the estate. Like all of the buildings in the Palace District, the mansion had backup generators, and Firebright was going through a fortune in energon powering it. Not so much as the Prime was, the House of Sparks Ascendant had been lit up every night, but what still have to be a small fortune. There were no lights on in the storage rooms, the servant's quarters, or the garages that held the transports, and the ones in Firebright's private apartments were turned way down. That small fortune, Killswitch guessed, was probably becoming a large fortune.

Even with the lights down, he made his way slowly up to the rifle room, staying hidden and slipping in behind one of the servants who had come by to check on things to avoid triggering the door himself. He hurried behind the cabinets, he didn't want to get caught out. The moment the other servant left, he heard the unmistakable _tsch-hiss_ of t-cogs cycling and Lasersight and Grids exploded out of their cabinet.

"Hi!" Lasersight called out, waving to him frantically, as though they hadn't just been chatting together over the comm.

FO: Oh my god, Las.  
FO: I was just here twenty minutes ago.  
FO: Are you two ready to go?

His vocalizer still refused to engage. He was for Firebright, and he wasn't to speak to anyone but his master. Lasersight reached out to him with tiny, grasping servos and he stacked two of the cubes in them. The other two he handed over to the more serene Grids and watched them vanish into subspace. They had a few other things, knives and small tarps to keep the cold out. A fistful of credit sticks each. 

Lasersight was looking up at him, nodding enthusiastically. Killswitch took one servo in each of his and led them over to the balcony.

"There's no way to get down," Grids said, leaning over the edge. 

FO: I'll lower you down.  
FO: We'll cut one of the tarps and I'll tie it around myself and use the railing to brace.

Lasersight gave him a plaintive look, and Grids said, "we really wish you would come with us."

FO: I can't.  
FO: You'll have to hold on tightly.

He took one of the tarps and slit it, then slit it again, winding it around his waist and tying it off. It reached most of the way to the ground, with only a short drop that he didn't think would hurt Lasersight and Grids. Or at least, it would hurt them less then Firebright's boredom. One at a time, he lifted them onto the balcony railing. Grids started climb down precariously and Lasersight gripped his arms.

"We will come back for you someday." In the darkness, all he could see was Lasersight's little optics on the other side of the railing. "Sorry that Firebright is bad."

He slid down into a sitting position, his back against the railing, to give them just a few more feet. Occasionally he felt the tarp swing or tug, but Lasersight kept sending him status reports about the climb. Guiltily, he couldn't help but to feel glad they were going. Now Firebright would _have_ to pay attention to him. Something deep inside him was trying to caution him that the last thing he wanted was Firebright's attention, but he ignored it.

They almost got away with it too.

\------------

Denas District was an expansion to Iacon that, following the mass suicide of its workforce, had never been finished. There had been a few attempts at recovery of the frames, but the company who had financed the project was bankrupt, and the efforts had failed.

That was the polite way of putting it.

"Unicron's fucking valve." The words left Impactor's vocalizer in a single, soft vent. The most subdued Barricade had ever seen the mech. No wonder, he could probably see further than any of them and all that lay in front of them was a sea of twisted corpses, grey with death. Barricade had expected it to stink, and it did, in a way. There was a musty odor of stagnant, poisonous runoff and old dust, but the protoflesh had long since rotted away and left bare metal behind. 

Hesitantly, he put one pede forward, rested his weight on it, heard a framiliar crunch. 

He turned to Runner. "You said we could get through here!"

The slim two-wheeler shrugged. "We can. Be careful where you step. Bodies so deep in places you can plunge right through. Have to dig you out."

To Barricade's surprise, Impactor didn't look worried. "I'll go first," he said with a shrug. "Find us a safe route. We're not going to be able to cross it like Runner does, we're all to heavy."

Even more surprising was that Impactor seemed to know what he was doing, going slowly, testing the tangle of limbs and frames that passed as ground without losing his footing. After an hour of picking their way across, he found a raised area of bare stone and dirt and led them along it. It forced Barricade to reevaluate his opinion of the mech. He had thought Impactor was just muscle, but a miner would know best how to navigate this place, and Megatron had known that too.

He went down once before they reached the little lip of land, his right leg punching through a brittle torso plate and sending him off balance. Desperately, he grabbed for purchase, feeling the razor edge of panic as something scored along the plating of his thigh, and then Motormaster pulled him up and steadied him.

"Nice one, spikesucker," he said.

"Thanks, fuckface," was Barricade's reply.

They passed rusted, creaking cranes hanging over them like ancient sentries, here and there the were crumbling skeletons of heavy machinery, and somewhere above, grey light filtering down. Barricade thought he heard traffic, and he touched Runner's arm. "Did they pave over this place?"

"Oh yeah," Runner said, nodding enthusiastically. "The Lumina Skyway goes right over this section."

Impactor laughed sharply. "That's the Senate, always fucking thinking of us, aren't they?"

"Talk like that, you should become a Decepticon." Barricade paused beside him, gazing up the shafts of light and listening to the distant roar of traffic. 

"Naw," Impactor said, grinning. "Megs has tried to pull that string before. I'm not much into doing the right thing."

They skirted around a pool where runoff from the highway was collecting. Some of it water, some of it oil and other residue. It lapped at the corpses around its banks, and the rusting frames were slowly collapsing into it. Barricade estimated that they'd been walking for five hours, which meant it would be at least another five to get out. He would bear it, even if he was dragging along twenty recalcitrant mechs, there was no way he was recharging in here.

Another hour brought them to what Barricade could only call a refuse heap. It was a pile of construction equipment, scaffolding, sections of walls and girders stacked together haphazardly - the slope was steep, and even Motormaster had to crane his neck cabling to look up towards the apex, which vanished into the grey light. It looked unstable, and Barricade thought the sight of it would send Hook and his crew into fits.

"We're supposed to climb that thing?" Motormaster aimed a kick at the pile, and part of it collapsed around his pede, as though the pile somehow agreed with him and thought it was a bad idea too.

Runner shrugged, and started scrambling up the side with the confidence of long practice. "Only if you wanna get out and into the city outskirts."

Impactor was staring at it, evaluating, and Barricade watched him. Finally, he nodded. "It can be done. Runner, you first, then Barry, then Moto and me."

"You don't want to go first?" Motormaster frowned at him, annoyed. "Scope the thing out for us?"

"Runner can do that. You and I are going to catch him and Barry if they slide."

Motormaster's gaze shifted back up the incline, towards where it disappeared into the weak lights. "What if we fall?"

Impactor grinned obscenely. "Gotta try our best not to, I guess. Can't lash ourselves together, it's to unstable."

The climb went slowly. Agonizingly so. The only good thing about it was that they weren't climbing over corpses anymore. Runner was so small he could scramble upwards ahead of them, heedless of the shifting garbage. Barricade, the next lightest, could manage, and Impactor simply seemed to know what he was doing. More miner's institution or some slag like that, or at that was his best guess. Motormaster, who was a heavy thing, built for the open roads, was miserable and slowed them down significantly.

Then, halfway up, a girder collapsed under his pede and he fell.

To his credit, he didn't scream, not that there was anyone to hear it or give away their position to. If not for the snap of the girder Barricade wouldn't even have known it was happening, and Motormaster looked more confused than anything. 

"Fuck, fuck." Barricade turned, just in time to see Impactor grab for him, miss his mark, and Motormaster slide back into the darkness. His red optics the last thing to vanish. "Fuck!"

There sickening crash and then there was a long silence.

"Primus' bearings," Impactor turned too, slower and more carefully. "Think he--"

"I'm not dead, you fucking slagfaces!" Motormaster's voice echoed back up the pile, shaky but angry. "Maybe help me if you're not doing something else!?"

"Goddamn." Impactor started back down, destroying two hours of upwards progress and Barricade told Runner to wait and followed him. Motormaster had stopped sliding when part of a broken off pole had impaled him through the arm and slowed him enough that he'd caught a handhold. The position he was in left his pedes dangling out over open air. 

"Look at that," Impactor said. "Unicron really _does_ look after his own. Barry, give me a servo here. We're going to have to pull him off that thing."

"Both of you can suck my spike!" Motormaster called back up, he sounded more angry then afraid, and Barricade was grateful for that. At least he wasn't panicking and making things worse.

"Sure thing, buddy. Pop your panel." Barricade gripped Motormaster by his good arm, trying to find a good place to brace his legs. Impactor cut the pole near where it disappeared into the pile and grabbed his other arm. As they pulled him up, there was a wet, scraping sound, and he left a trail of blue energon trickling down over the side. Once they had him secure, Motormaster gritted his denta and let Barricade pull the rest of the pole free from his arm.

"Gonna get a rust infection," Impactor said, nonchalant.

"Yeah, no slag."

Barricade had some static bandages in his subspace, and he wound one around Motormaster's arm until he was satisfied the leak had stopped. "Can you drive?"

"Think so," Motormaster said, "but I can't exactly transform here to check it out. Least it didn't hit my tires."

"We need to keep going." Barricade glanced back up, towards the top. "We lost time."

They had, but it turned out it didn't matter. The pile didn't reach all the way to the top. Stretched precariously between where they stood and a partially collapsed roadway that looked like it led out was a tangle of wires, cabling, and the swaying remains of the side of an apartment building. Barricade felt his servos clench, and resisted the urge to belt Runner, who was cringing.

"The last time I came through it was connected!" He turned to face them, his expression anguished. He must have sensed their fields. "It was clear!"

"There has to be another way out," Barricade said, his shadow fell across the two-wheeler. "There had better be."

"I--" Runner began, but Impactor had gone past him, to rest one hand on the cables.

"Barry, you aren't going to like this, but--"

Barricade darted his optics up and down the cabling. "Don't tell me we can climb it."

" _We_ can't climb it. I'm to heavy. Moto fucked his arm up and now he's got to save all his strength for jerking himself off. It'll hold you and Runner though."

"Hey, buddy, right here." Motormaster gestured with his good arm, middle finger raised.

Barricade ex-vented slowly. "You're sure?"

Impactor nodded, and as though he wanted to put distance between himself and Barricade, Runner had already started up the pile. Barricade grimaced, but he was in charge here, and he had to see this through. He gripped the cabling in both servos, testing it. It wobbled, but held.

"Go slow," said Impactor. "Keep your center of gravity low. Oh, and one more thing. Hold onto this for me."

The miner plucked something out of his subspace and tossed it to Barricade. It glinted in the light, and he snatched it out of the air with one servo.

It was the iron charm.


	4. The Sorcerer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tarn's been out of his cell for like five minutes and he's already feeling another dude up. Some bad things happen this chapter, especially to Vos and Barricade.

At the height of the Age of Two Suns, Cybertron had a population of just over one hundred billion sparks.

Each moon was home to another twenty billion, and another fifty billion were scattered across the galaxy in the colonies, the military, or pursuing off-planet interests with private Fleets.

The Great War had decimated the Cybertronian population, but even so, the entire Decepticon Justice Division consisted of five mechs.

There were others who helped them, of course. An organization like the DJD didn't exist without support staff, even if they operated more or less independently of Decepticon High Command. Soundwave, the Emperor's third in command. Sunbeam, who was Megatron's most favored state artist and chief propagandist. Knock Out, his personal physician, but Tarn's too. Deadlock, the assassin, a mech whose kill count rivaled the entire Division's and who helped them hunt down or locate particularly difficult marks. Tarn even had nicknames for them. Jiara, Meru, Dead End.

Still, the gulf between reputation and reality was wider than most of the rank-and-file Decepticons knew. The whole mythology surrounding the DJD was as important to the Cause as the mechs themselves.

Barricade was perfectly aware that Tarn wasn't _really_ the avatar of Unicron. That the DJD weren't watching everyone every second. That Tarn couldn't project himself across the galaxy, even if his psychic gifts _could_ be accurately described as 'astropathic'. That they didn't drop screaming out of the sky the moment an Autobot medic slapped a static bandage on you or you cursed on Primus' bearings.

Hell, he'd once heard Sunbeam complaining that if she had to edit one more video where everyone's back was to the camera, she was going to have someone fly her out to the Peaceful Tyranny to give them all lessons in blocking and stage direction. Tarn probably would have loved it. He had a flare for the dramatic.

... but that being said, his first and only fight with the future leader of the DJD had been embarrassingly one-sided.

\------------

It was evening when he climbed out onto the streets with Runner. The two-wheeler shook out his plating and preened, while Barricade dusted himself off as best he could. In the distance he could see the wall that marked the border of Iacon, and they were inside of it. Slightly to the north and west, he see could the remains of the burning Array. 

The combiner hadn't destroyed it, Soundwave had told him that much. The explosion had been engineered to cover up the damage it was causing, and to import soldiers into the outskirts in the guise of emergency crews. The ruins, ugly habs, and warehouses that surrounded it were still burning, and it was steadily raining ash that blotted out the last weak rays of Cybertron's sun.

He came across the first patrol of soldiers after ten minutes of driving.

They were all offline, their internals pulled out through their midsections and scattered up and down the street. That didn't look like it was what had killed them though, something was wrong with their faces, their expressions were half melted and the protoflesh was twisted impossibly. 

Runner rolled over to the edge of the road, transformed, and purged into the gutter, his legs shaking. 

"Hey, Runner," Barricade said, thinking about Motormaster and Impactor waiting on top of the refuse pile and wishing they were here. What exactly they'd do that a unit of trained soldiers couldn't, he didn't know. "You did enough. Go and hide. I'll come and find you when I sort this thing out."

Runner didn't argue, and Barricade guessed he would have described his expression as 'grateful'. The courier transformed again, and edged his way between two buildings, disappearing from sight.

Where the streets were clear, he transformed and drove, where they were blocked, he switched back to root-mode and picked his way through the rubble. His HUD pinged him with a warning. Yellow gradient. He was venting in to much ash, but there was nothing for it and it wasn't going to offline him.

The dead were everywhere, scatted and ruined, but somehow just as everpresent as they were in the depths below the finished district. It seemed more real to Barricade here, maybe it was the energon and rotting protoflesh, or maybe it was the immediacy of the situation. He found a trio of corpses huddled together in the remains of a store, another solider (this one missing his face), and a group of R-Series drones huddled together - all dispatched by headshots. Escapees, Barricade guessed. They didn't want anyone telling the story of why the Array exploded, he guessed. Must have been trying to run.

How far the Senate was willing to go to cover this up, he wasn't sure, but he found himself listening for the roar of flight engines. Firebombing the whole district wouldn't be out of the question, and he wondered if it would be enough to kill the combiner.

After all, Barricade was going to try it with nothing but Soundwave's assurance that he could disrupt the thing's powers - even at this range.

Luckily, if you wanted to call it that, he didn't need to go looking for the combiner. When it sensed his mind and found it couldn't torment him from a distance, it came looking for him.

His first impression was that it was fucking huge. Easily four times the height of Megatron, whose shoulder Barricade barely reached. It wasn't Unicron's Brass-Skinned Dancer after all, it was mostly black and red and gold, though its protoflesh had a bronzed, metallic sheen to it. The spark whirling in its chamber was so bright that panels couldn't conceal it, and poisonous green light washed out from it in waves.

He got a close up of all this because the thing strode out from behind a building and plucked his vehicle mode off the road, lifting him up to optic-level with it. It had eight of them, but one looked like it had been put out. If that was some cosmetic affectation or if someone had shot the thing in face, Barricade didn't know. It had eight arms too, instead of the six he had originally picked out in the blurry holovid, though one bore a Decepticon badge and was severed at the elbow.

Desperately, he transformed and tried to access his weapons loadout, and in response the thing _squeezed_ him. Warnings flooded his HUD, his vision crowding with red-yellow lights.

"Is this one Brownout?" it asked, talking to itself, as far as Barricade could tell. He could feel each word pressing down against his spark, battering it with weight. Its voice was beautiful, like the music Megatron listened to sometimes, but somehow even more affecting. It made him feel like he was in the front row of a theater, listening to a symphony composed solely for him.

"No," it said in response to no one in particular, two pairs of lower arms coiling around itself in some kind of obscene embrace. "I suppose not every ugly car is Brownout, but I have something special in mind for when I find him. I won't allow him to touch you again."

"I'm a truck, you bastard!" It tightened its grip, and Barricade felt a strut somewhere in his chest pop. Red lines of pain shot through his frame, and he gritted his denta. "...and I came here to rescue you, so maybe you wanna stop killin' me?!"

It reached out with one arm and hooked a claw under his chin, forcing him to look up. Green optics burned aftereffects into his visual feed. "Now _that_ is a new type of begging. I quite like it, though I'm not going to stop killing you."

His frame bounced as it dashed him against the ground, like a sparkling's toy, carelessly discarded. Agony lanced through him and he felt his shoulder crumple inwards, his arm going dead under him. Energon streaked across the pavement as his face scraped over it, tearing open his cheek and cracking his optical glass. Along his jaw, three of his dental chips had been knocked loose, and he'd swallowed them. Fuck.

Before he could get back up, it was on him, hooking one pede under him and rolling him over onto his back. His visual field was glitching, what wasn't was rapidly crowding with error messages and requests to begin auto-repair functions. _Right Arm Non-Functional. Transformation Sequence Locked. Seek Medical Attention. Optical Glass Compromised. Visual Input At 40_ \-- Barricade denied them all and he tried to reset his HUD, if he lived through this, he'd need all his energy just to get back. How he'd do that without being able to transform, he didn't know.

"Shh, shhh," it whispered. The weight of its pede vanished from Barricade's chest, only to be replaced with the weight of its body, laying across him and caressing his ruined cheek in a sick parody of intimacy. He felt like its touch was staining his fields, and his wanted to retch. "It won't be over soon, but shhh. I don't like to be distracted at this part. Later, you can scream all you like."

Heavy servos trailed down his body, to the seam on his chestplates. Barricade raised his good arm, to try and wrench it away. He'd always thought of himself as a strong mech, but the attempt felt feeble. "No."

It cackled. "Yes."

...but then one of its servos touched over his Decepticon badge - which Barricade wore over the seam, above his spark chamber - and the thing jerked back, like it had been burned. The scene must have looked outrageous, the monster half-kneeling, half-laying over him, poking curiously at his badge.

"What's this? You're a Decepticon?"

"Y-Y-Y-Y----" Barricade's vocalizer failed to respond, so he rebooted it and nodded.

Surprise and thrill chased each other across its faceplaces. A giant servo closed around his midsection and he was lifted into the air again, arms free this time, but with his pedes swinging. Barricade tried not to think about the soldiers with their internals torn out as he felt the pressure of its fingers. It drew him close.

"Did Redcap send you to find me?"

He had no idea who that was, but decided it was best not to point that out. "Bit h-Higher up. Megatron. I-If you want proof--" With his good arm, he tapped the side of his helm. "Take a l-l-look."

It drew him even closer, Barricade could feel the withering heat of its ex-vents. Weight from the light of its spark washed over him in waves. It stank of acid and spilled energon and death, and he resolved not to purge. For a single paralyzing second, he worried it was going to kiss him.

As the thing reached out with its mind, Soundwave was there, and his presence fell over Barricade like the night sky. The mech wasn't physically present (Soundwave rarely was, but he was a master of presence in absence), and Barricade sensed him in the great, chasm of silence that opened within his processor, like a predator coiling to strike. He was in the cold, purple indicator lights of the street cameras. In the flickering text on the few street signs that hadn't been swallowed up by the fires. He was a shadow moving across glitching, half-functioning screens in broken shop windows.

The most powerful telepath ever to claw their way free from the Well.

\-- echoingSilence [ES] sent shieldWall [SW] a message! --

ES: Apologies.  
ES: Some precautions necessary.  
ES: Recommend preparation.

A virus uploaded into his processor and executed itself with the precision of a quick surgical cut.

Barricade's audials went dead.

The thing touched his mind and when the connection opened, Soundwave surged across - a shadow in flight. There was a brief moment of silence, and then it dropped him. He fell twice his height to the paved road below and landed awkwardly, something in his right ankle popped out of place, but the strut held. Compared with the burning pain in his cheek and his shoulder socket, he barely felt it.

...and then it started screaming. Power roiled off it in a cascade, like rolling thunder or the impact of a comet into the oceans near the Pole. Barricade shielded his face with his good arm as dust and debris were blasted away from it, pelting and scratching his plating. The street shook as it thrashed, trying to burn Soundwave out of its head, but it was useless. Soundwave had his denta in it now, and he wouldn't let go. Not until one of them died. Barricade had seen the silent mech kill like this before, cleanly and utterly without passion. Bypassing the frame and going straight for the processor, though it didn't usually take so long.

Screens popped and glass shattered up and down the street as the thing shrieked. Green light was pouring out of its seams and pooling on the ground beneath it, cracks forming throughout its superstructure. And then it came apart, its body folding impossibly, twisting and coiling away as mass was subspaced or simply vanished. Combining was half natural ability and half mystical art, after all. 

Inside of the monster there were two mechs.

One was smaller, and he was up in the air, like he was about to jump into the larger mech's arms. He looked like the R-Series that Barricade had seen earlier, only red-gold instead of blue-black. The bigger mech was unformed and undefined, like a sparkling who hadn't yet transformed for the first time. He had treads, broad shoulders, magenta biolights. It was all Barricade saw before they both clattered to the ground in the pool of light - puppets with cut strings, flakes of green luminescence drifting upwards until they flickered out and vanished.

The scene would have almost looked peaceful, if not for the carnage.

SW: you seeing this?  
ES: Affirmative.  
SW: slag, sounders, you kill them?  
ES: Negative.  
ES: Neutralized. Stasis lock.  
SW: i can't carry them both, i need--  
ES: Runner-5920 already informed.  
ES: He is inbound.  
SW: thanks.

Despite Soundwave's reassurance, Barricade approached the two mechs slowly. The smaller one - the one with the badge - was laying across the bigger one's chest, missing an arm. The bigger one hand one arm thrown over him, in a mockery of a lover's embrace. Stasis lock or not, it was better to be safe than sorry, and Barricade hauled them apart and wrapped the stump of his arm in a static bandage. The process went slowly, and he fumbled with only one servo to work with. Maybe it was a little less gentle than he _could_ have done it, but after the beating he'd just taken, he wasn't in the mood to be generous.

The bigger mech was in better shape. Probably around Megatron's size, if Barricade was guessing. The treads probably meant he was an excavator or a tank, but even an untrained optic could tell that the mech didn't yet have an alt-mode. He was handsome in the same plain way that Megatron was, square-jawed and strong, with powerful features - though Barricade was hardly feeling charitable at the moment. There were bruises and dents around the unconscious mech's throat cabling, his wrists, his ankles. In places, the paint had been entirely scraped away. Telltale signs of long, brutal confinement.

He gripped the mech by his chestplates, to pick him up, and the seam slid open without resistance. It startled Barricade enough that he dropped the unformed mech back onto the road with an echoing clag. The inside edge of the plate was smooth. Someone had cut the lock away, and the spark inside the monster's chest was sea-green, turning ponderously. It looked like an eight pointed sun, with one point broken off and laying in the bottom of the chamber. Staring down at it made him feel unclean, like he was somehow participating in all the abuses the mech had surely suffered. Quickly, he snapped the plates shut and secured them as best he could with a static bandage - his last one - but he didn't want them sliding open in front of Motormaster.

Runner appeared while he was working, nosing his way in through the rubble in vehicle mode. Barricade didn't hear him coming, his audials were still dead, and when the two-wheeler touched his arm he jumped. Whatever Soundwave had done to his audials would need medical intervention, and this was not a good situation. He was in agony, deaf, mostly on mute, crippled and half-blind. His frame creaked and protested as he insisted on staying on his pedes.

SW: my audials are fuckin' dead. optics messed up too.  
SW: stay on the comm, need you to lead the way.  
SW: carry the smaller one in your vehicle mode, i got this fucker.  
SW: need to get them out of here.  
R-5920: primuses bearings  
R-5920: your tougher then you got a right to be barry  
SW: yeah. guess i am.

Barricade reached down, maneuvering the bigger mech so he could rest the weight against his good shoulder - 'good' being a pretty fucking relative assessment at this point.

He didn't know it at the time, but he was signing a hundred thousand death warrants.

\------------

The bruised protoflesh under his optic burst open when Firebright's fist connected with it and energon spilled down his face in a steady trickle. Killswitch clattered backwards, he had already been kneeling, and the blow sent him flying. He was so much lighter than the jet that each strike unbalanced him. If it wasn't his master hitting him, he could have compensated, and his processor unhelpfully provided him with dozens of recommendations on how to block such a blow - even when it came from a larger mech. He came to rest on his side and lay there, unwilling to fight back but refusing to get up and face the next blow. A pair of guards were watching, as if Firebright needed help defending himself.

"Did you think you could get away with this!?" The jet stalked over and aimed a kick at the small of his back. The impact jarred him, rolling him onto his front and making his visual feed flash red. "Stealing my property?"

 _We aren't your property_. Killswitch thought, even as his processor told him he was being wrong-headed about it. He said nothing. Secretly, he hoped Firebright would kill him. At least it would end. His life had been short, by anyone's definition, but maybe he would get the chance to try again.

Firebright kicked him over onto his back and stepped on the panel of his array, the thin metal denting inwards as pain bloomed through his hip joints.

"Open," he said, his tone cold. Good. At least the beating was over and they could get on with the rape.

Killswitch thought, for a moment, to keep himself closed in defiance, but his frame responded automatically to his owner's command. Or at least, it tried to. The dented panel strained and creaked, but didn't budge. Firebright had damaged it somehow, and he couldn't trigger it open. Undeterred, the jet stepped on his thigh, reaching down and easing a talon into the seam.

 _What is he doing_ \--

But the thought vanished in a hot bolt of fresh pain as Firebright tore the panel off, and his legs kicked and lashed involuntarily against the violation, a pathetic squeak of noise scratching its way out of his vocalizer. Before he could form any kind of real protest, Firebright hauled him up and threw him down on the desk, pinning him down by his throat cabling. Killswitch gripped at his arm, trying desperately to cycle air, but the jet's grip was to tight.

His whole array felt like it was on fire, and errors scrolled endlessly along his HUD. Worst and more humiliatingly of all, was that his frame sensed what his master was preparing for, and started a lubrication cycle, silvery fluids dripping from his valve and pooling on the polished surface of the desk. 

Firebright laughed sharply, gazing down at him. "Look at that, you still know who you belong to, don't you?" The jet eased two of his fingers into Killswitch's valve, and he felt his whole frame tense, Firebright hadn't retracted his talons, and they tore into the folds and delicate mesh lining. It was to much, he screamed, the noise muffled by Firebright's hand on his throat.

The fingers pulled free, and Killswitch was in to much pain to tell what was from the torn connectors and what was from the internal bleeding. He tried to draw his legs shut, but Firebright let go of his throat and wrenched them back open. The room spun, until he couldn't tell if he was laying on the desk. His frame jerked as Firebright replaced his fingers with his spike, each thrust worsening the tears until he was bleeding freely, his energy levels plummeting.

Darkness crept in around the corners of his vision, and he felt cold. His servos were gripping and pushing at Firebright, but his owner seemed very far away. 

His hips jerked as the spike he was impaled on was yanked free, and Firebright overloaded across his frame.

"Clean this up," he was saying, and Killswitch heard his voice drifting further and further away. "And get rid of the body when you're done."

\------------

"This friend of yours, Perceptor, he's an adolescent?"

Ratchet felt withered under Malleus' gaze, serene as it was. The Prime was a beautiful creature, twice Ratchet's height, with an immobile sorcerous array as his alt-mode. The rings of the array were present in his root mode as well, descending from his back in a sweep of false wings. He had seen Malleus use them to glide through the air or outright fly, though as the Prime's personal physician, he knew the ability partially a mod and partially sorcery.

He had loved Malleus, and the feeling of it paralyzed him. The emotion seemed like a distant memory. There were others he loved now, Pharma, Orion, Wheeljack, even if he had trouble recalling their faces.

"If his math is correct, his age shouldn't matter." He was pleading now, trying to hold just a fragment more of his creator's attention. 

"Ratchet," Malleus said, his smile was indulgent and condescending, but Ratchet's spirits raised just seeing that, "since it means so much to you, the next time I consult with Vector Sigma, I can ask it to double check your little friend's pet project."

The need to scream at himself, at Malleus, at the priests, at anyone, to just _listen_ , came bubbling up through his fields. Had he ever been this young? Why was he acting like this, faltering and desperate and wet with love?

"...and speaking of projects, how is _ours_ progressing?" A trick, then. Agreeing to see Perceptor's work in exchange for Ratchet's own, and anything he withheld would become an excuse not to take Perceptor seriously. A frown creased his face, and Malleus smiled again, less condescendingly this time. "Ratchet, imagine all those mechs laboring outside the Palace, devoid of purpose--"

"I _have_ to imagine it," Ratchet said, perhaps more bitingly than he had intended. "Since I'm not allowed outside the palace grounds."

The Prime cupped his cheeks and stroked over them with his thumbs, chuckling softly. Primus, had Malleus always treated him like a sparkling? "The world is dangerous and crude, dearest, it is not for you. You would wither and die out there. Best that you stay here in comfort, my perfect creation, where I can protect you."

"But, I--" Ratchet began.

"The project, Ratchet." Swiftly, Malleus righted the course of the conversation. "How is your work progressing?"

The _Project_. The reason he had been given a spark, his purpose.

Cybertronians, as a species, were extraordinarily long-lived. His work for Malleus had occasionally allowed him to study organic life-cycles, and the breadth of difference between them was astounding. Newly sparked Cybertronians could become fully functional adults within a matter of months or weeks, and in exceptional cases (the case with Pharma, for example), hours. Organics needed constant care for years, or even decades. And while the Cybertronian lifespan was divided up into five cycles, the truth was that very little degradation or decline in quality of life occurred until a mech was so old he was dying of it. There was little practical difference in the working capacity of a mech in their first life-cycle compared with one in their last.

It was part of what made it so profitable to work the drones to death, but that hadn't come yet. 

An Earth-aspect, such as Ratchet, would naturally live longer then normal. Fire-aspects, in contrast, led shorter lives. Burning twice as bright for half as long, was the saying, perhaps a slight exaggeration on the tendency of Fire mechs to burn themselves out. Air and Water filled out the middle, providing balance and stability. The Cybertronian lifespan could be extended, almost doubled, through the use of anagathic drugs and sorcery, if a mech was rich and favored enough to have access to them. Primes, such as Malleus, were possessed of nearly triple the normal lifespan - though they were not immortal. Other than the Matropolii and Patropolii, no Cybertronian was. Eventually their spark would spin down and flicker out.

Which was exactly what Malleus wanted to change. For himself, at least. It was why he had created Ratchet, called out to him before he had Ignited and led him from the Well, under the warm, constant light of the Pillar's stars. He wanted to find a way to halt the spin of his spark, so he might live forever.

More troubling, was that Ratchet realized he knew how it might be done, but the process was to terrible to even contemplate.

\--and besides, thank Primus, there was no great storehouse of sparks that might used as the dross and fuel for it.

"I'm... still working," Ratchet said, bowing his helm, and recalling that was he was doing was stalling. The answer didn't seem like enough, so he added, "Lord Prime."

Malleus leaned down and kissed him softly. "I know that you won't disappoint me, but I can't wait forever."

Neither could Cybertron, as it turned out.

\------------

Traditionally, Perceptor had very bad luck during the Calibration. Worse though, was the fact that there was no logical or astrophysical reason for it.

He was an Air-aspect, and his stars formed the constellation of the Sorcerer. It was an auspicious enough alignment, and in theory, he shouldn't be attracting any untoward metaphysical attention. And yet, every year, he did.

Last year, a part of the Academy's lab had collapsed onto him. The year before, on his way to visit Ratchet for a Calibration party, the transport carrying him had crashed. The year before _that_ , his apartments at the Academy caught fire, destroying a project half a year in the making. The year before that--

Well, there was no point in carrying on about it, even if he suspected if the Dean had told him to stay at home as much for the good of the school as his own.

Pharma had called him to give an update about Ratchet, and while he was worried, Perceptor didn't dare try to navigate the streets of the Dead End without a vehicle mode. Calibration parties were turning into riots because of the power outage, or riots were simply breaking out across all the districts. Ratchet was in the hands of the best surgeon on Cybertron - other than Ratchet himself, of course. Perceptor would simply have to content himself with that.

To keep himself occupied, he had tracked a comet, experimented with a new recipe for warmed energon, and studied. Other than the Prime, he was one of the only living sorcerers on Cybertron, and there was always being studying to be done. The art contained such a vast bredth of undiscovered knowledge that even Perceptor feared that it might not all be recovered. He was diligent in recording his research, but at times he felt had barely made a dent in what there was to know.

Around midnight, he had gone for a walk, marveling at his luck this year and the lack of personal disaster. His home lay against the wall of the Palace district, near enough to the Academy to lay within walking distance - one of the many curses of not having a vehicle mode. Not that he would have changed, or could have. His spark had settled long ago, almost the from moment he had followed the yellow-gold stars of the Sorcerer out of the Well.

As he passed it, something caught his eye. Movement, perhaps, up at the top of the Palace's wall.

Rearranging his optics and bringing some of his better lenses to bear, he tried to focus in on it.

That was when the drone's battered frame, pitched from the top of the wall, hit him and knocked him directly into stasis.


	5. The Banner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hold your hand up to the sun, cast a shadow on the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's all Orion, all the time. We need to play catch-up with him.

What Orion had told Sunbeam was true, he had become an Enforcer in the hopes of helping his fellow Cybertronians.

...but his spark loved the open road, and he could have been happy as a hauler.

And if he had been happy, would he still have attracted the attention of Primus? It was a question he had considered at great length, if privately. There was no one he could share his worries with, not without putting them in danger.

If there was anything to make the long journey to Kaon unpleasant, it was that he was traveling alone. He longed for Prowl's company, no matter taciturn. For Wheeljack and his playful, inappropriate jabs. Ratchet probably would not have tolerated such a long road trip, but Orion would have liked to have him nearby, no matter how bitter he was or how much he complained. Even Tumbler's easygoing, almost passive companionship would have been welcome.

Finally, his thoughts turned to Sunbeam, and he spent some time wondering about her. Did she like to drive? What did her vehicle mode look like? If she was like others in the very high castes, it was possible that cosmetic modifications had rendered it useless for anything other than cruising the city's sheltered skyways. Did she ever recharge in her alt-mode? It was practically necessary when you were driving cross-country. Did she--

Orion cut himself off. There was no point in going down that road.

He felt no small amount of guilt for his decision not to reveal himself to her. Then again, what would he have said? If he had revealed his nature, she might have come to him out of fear or some perverse sense of obligation, and that he could not abide. Besides, it wasn't as if he had outright _lied_ to her, though the justification felt tacky and sour in his processor. The conversation had hardly been truthful either. She was, however, a Decepticon. Orion suspected she could handle some half-truths.

The thought of Prowl, or Sunbeam, or any other prospective lover coming to him unwilling, or willing only because they felt they could not deny the wishes of a Prime (which to Orion's mind was the same thing as unwilling) was off-putting. It was easier, he resolved to himself, simply to be alone. He put any thoughts of lovers aside, dwelling on it would only make things harder.

The roads in and out Iacon were always busy. Mechs traveled there looking for work, for business, on pilgrimages, to visit, or on vacation. Most of the main thoroughfares in and out of Iacon were flanked by buildings that had spilled out beyond the city walls. Many of them were clusters of habitat buildings - some of them surprisingly well built. Space was limited within the city proper - even the Primes lived in apartments (albeit gigantic ones), and some wealthy mechs owned estates outside the walls for want of larger grounds.

Once there was shanix to be hand, other mechs had come outside the wall to get what they saw as their share of it. There were clusters of uglier habs to house servants and slaves, stores and bars, shrines to suit every temperament - so there was no need to travel into the city for spiritual fulfillment. There were hotels for tourists and pilgrims to rest in, and roadside attractions to relieve them of their money.

The first night, he met a company of mercenaries from Kaia, the city that had been destroyed in the voidquake caused by Malleus Prime. They wore mourning masks and griever paint, though it would not be Calibration until the day changed. Kaians themselves were considered strange outsiders by most Cybertronians, shunned and feared, being that they were considered Unicron worshipers and death cultists. Although they owned themselves, they were outcastes, and they weren't permitted to live within any city that rested over the heart of a Titan. It made the Kaian survivors largely nomadic, traveling across Cybertron in loose warbands, fighting for whoever would pay them. They were useful as a military force, as he understood it, because they had little connection to any specific cause and most Cybertronians considered them disposable.

Their leader was a shuttle named Sundiver, and after they had chatted a while at a dispensing station, she invited him over to drink with them. She was close to his size - just barely taller, and she would have been even bigger if she wasn't subspacing more than fifty percent of her mass. She wore a steelsilk shawl, wound around her shoulders, chestplates, and waist. From it danged dozens of cords of bells and hand-hammered charms. Most of her frame was covered in elaborate etchings, and she painted herself gold, silver, and purple. Unicron's colors. 

Sharing energon with Kaians was expressly forbidden, but if he had some thought to unite all mechs, it was as good a tradition to start defying as any.

Not that were many Kaians left. Orion guessed that perhaps one out of every three members of Diver's (as she insisted on being called) warband were former natives of Kaia. The rest of the group was filled out with escaped slaves, outcastes, and other mechs that most Cybertronians considered 'undesirables'. They were not allowed to stay in the garages connected to the dispensing station, and so they were camped outside and to the west of it, celebrating the approach of Calibration rancorously. Standing on the sidelines and drinking engex with Diver, he felt like an outsider, but not entirely unwelcome.

"Is it true that you worship Unicron?" he asked, during a lull in the music. 

"Yes," she said, her wings lowering. The question didn't agitate her, though he sensed she had answered it many times before. "Not out of love, but because we owe him a debt. When he took our Patropolus from us, and we were cast out, he was preparing us."

"Preparing you for what?"

"To harden our sparks. To survive the end of an Age." She glanced at him, her optics orange-gold from the light of the fires. "Come and dance with me, Orion."

He was taken aback. "I cannot. I've never danced before."

"Then now is the perfect time to learn." Diver grinned, revealing teeth that had all been sharpened into fine points, and slapped his aft. He jumped. "Come on."

Before he could protest further, she was linking arms with him, pulling him out into the fray of her cavorting warband. The clashing fields of the other dancers swarmed across his senses, it would have been beyond unacceptable in Iacon - on the verge of social disaster, and his own fields were tightly reined in. Shuttles were not high on the list of mechs Orion had expected to be graceful, but Diver moved with the music as though rhythm was a part of her, her heavy pedes shaking the ground each time they struck it. Watching her made him feel heavy, and big, despite arguably being smaller than she was.

"You need to open your fields," Diver said, her voice raised over the roar of music. "You'll never feel the music properly when you're closed off like that."

"Dancing is somewhat more formal in Iacon," he said, helplessly, trying to keep up.

Diver shook with laughter and took his servos. "By 'formal' you mean 'terrible'. You don't even know how to dance to please Iaconions, so why keep trying? Is there some huge demand for worker mechs at their galas?"

"I suppose not," Orion said, letting his fields open, if only a fraction. He doubted Diver could tell he was a Prime just from his fields, but he hadn't intended to take chances. Immediately, he could feel everything, the elation of the gathering at the promise of a new year, the pulse of music, the surges of emotion carrying through the crowd. It was inappropriate and somehow exhilarating all at once. "Diver, I--"

"I told you," she said, laughing. "Shut up and dance!"

And he did, awkwardly at first - there was no denying it, but then he was moving with her, letting the music carry them. Diver broke away from him once he found his pedes, whirling between partners, her fields wild, like a scattering of asteroids. Between the roar of his cooling fans and the music, he couldn't hear anything, and condensation stood out on his armor. He navigated the ring of dancers in the opposite direction as her, and they met in the middle, their frames grinding against each other, the heat in her panels unmistakable for anything else.

She laid one arm over his shoulder and leaned into him. "Come to berth with me."

It instantly snapped him out of any enjoyment he had taken in dancing. "Diver, I... I cannot. I apologize."

"You know, Orion," she said, smiling wryly. "You're awful at flirting."

It was his turn to smile. "So I have been told."

"We could always--"

Diver was cut off as a flash of black lightning lit up the sky. It came from the outskirts and extended straight up into the atmosphere, bridging earth and sky. Orion was slow to react, a combination of engex and dancing, he didn't even have the chance to throw out a scan before the shockwave hit. It rained debris, dust, and stones into the little camp, and the music sputtered off in a painful crackle of static and feedback. He snapped his battlemask closed and raised one arm, to protect his face.

When he lowered it, he was somewhere else.

\------------

Wherever this place was, Orion didn't know.

He had never been formally educated, but he had occasionally seen holovids that depicted exotic off-world adventures. Largely, he had watched them to please Prowl - who found the idea of space adventure exciting. Often, they had featured locales on exotic planets, and this place could have been one of them.

The planet was beautiful, if one considered organic life beautiful. 'Lush', probably would have been the right word to use. There were plants everywhere, with colorful birds flitting between them, and the landscape was broken up by the jagged lines of rivers and streams. It was vastly different from Cybertron, where all the rivers and waterways that extended from the Pole of Water were meticulously planned and linear. There was a waterfall nearby, and mist from it collected on his plating. As far as he could see in any direction, there was no sign of artificial buildings or an intelligent attempt to master the environment.

It was peaceful here, lovely even.

Something was deeply wrong, Orion sensed it in the air. His frame felt alien, disjointed, and a scan returned the reason why.

He had no t-cog (there was a scar near his hip seam where it had presumably been excised), no lock on his chestplates (and thankfully, they were closed), and his fuel levels were balefully low. Twenty-five percent. Virtually redlining.

Desperately, he cast about for some explanation.

Sitting next to him was another Cybertronian, a little car he had no recollection of, and he ran a brief search for the racer though the Enforcer database and waited for it to return nothing to be sure. The car was green with an opalescent quality to his finish. Four door-wings instead of two. Two of them seemed to raise naturally, while the other two were positioned lower, giving the impression of insect wings. He sat hugging his knees, his fields drawn in, right down to nil. To Orion's cursory inspection, he seemed very young.

"Do you--" Orion said.

"Optimus." The little car cut him off. "We should try and escape, shouldn't we? I mean, it would be better than staying here, and the worst that could happen is that we'd die. Dying wouldn't be so bad, would it?"

 _Escape?_ What part of those statements was he supposed to focus on? He found didn't like any of them. _Who was Optimus? Him?_

"I... think it would be. Tell me, what is this place--"

He never got to find out. Darkness closed over him and he was gone.

\------------

When he awoke, he was laying on his back in an unfamiliar berth. Or not so much a berth as a raised platform that was just barely elevated off the ground, shielded from the wind by a patterned tarp. He heard bells and clinking, music. The Kaians? He took silent stock of the situation, running a full systems scan and counting down the seconds to stop himself from speculating until it returned.

He was fully functional, his energy levels hovering around a comfortable eighty-five percent. His t-cog was right where he had left it. No activity returned for his interfacing array, either spike or valve. An orange-yellow warning popped up, noting that just after midnight he had fallen into an artificially induced recharge cycle that had lasted ten hours, six minutes, and twenty-three seconds. Once he got back to Iacon, he would have to get Ratchet check it out and clear the alert.

Had he just been drunk and Diver had dumped him here when he'd passed out?

He didn't _feel_ hungover, or poisoned (either maliciously or accidentally), for that matter. The scan hadn't even returned a yellow-level warning about his engex consumption or any warnings for toxins or drugs. Substances that could evade a system scan did exist, and his training as an Enforcer had covered some basic facts about them, but they were expensive, rare, and he doubted the Kaians had access to them. Even if they did, why drug him only to do what appeared to be absolutely nothing?

 _Primus' bearings_ , he thought. What had he seen? A vision?

There was no shortage of literature on the subject of Primes having visions of past, present, and future. It was possible that it had been some side effect of his Second Ignition, but his other memories of last night were clear and crisp. There had been some kind of explosion, and then, the lightning. The others had seen it too. The phenomenon didn't seem to be confined to him. He needed--

The tarps parted with a soft rustling, and Diver leaned into the shelter more quietly than Orion would have expected, considering her size. "Check the public newsfeeds," she said, before his vocalizer could form a query.

One look told him that the phenomenon hadn't been confined to him. He scrolled back through the feeds, reading with growing disquiet. The Township Array had exploded following some sort of internal failure cascade. The power was out everywhere in Iacon except the Palace, and lower levels of the city were caught in the grip of a chaotic riot. Immediately, he tried a long-range comm to Ratchet, then Prowl, and finally Wheeljack. All three returned static and dead air. Orion cursed under his vents.

His helm spun as he sat up, and he rested his pedes on the ground. "Were any of the others in your warband affected?"

Diver was watching him carefully, a distance and cool composure in her fields that had not been there the night before. 

She knew what he was, he realized.

"You have to go," she said, her optics flicking towards the fluttering tarps that formed the passage of the shelter. "You can't stay here."

"Diver, what did you see?"

"Only that I haven't been nearly grateful enough that the Destroyer taught us how to survive." She crossed her arms over her chestplates. "If you can walk, then walk out of here."

He went. Outside the shelter, the mood was somber, even distant - though Orion sensed he was not the cause of it here, as he had been with Diver. One of her followers, a projector of some sort, was displaying footage of the explosions. Along the bottom of the image, a scrolling feed estimated the death toll in the tens of thousands. 

Orion didn't stop to watch. He walked out of the Kaian encampment and as soon as he was clear, he transformed, driving away the moment he felt his ties hit the ground.

For a long time, driving was _all_ he did, letting nothing enter his processor but navigational data. A part of him wanted to turn around and head back to Iacon, but whatever had happened had already happened. His friends were all capable mechs, and they could handle themselves. He couldn't lose his chance to meet with Megatron over a power outage and some downed long range commlinks. Weariness gnawed at him, despite the ten-hour recharge cycle, and he barely felt rested.

Three hundred miles passed before he allowed himself to think of the little green car and the look of utter consignment on his face. Helpless, like the expression a sacrifice would wear in an old painting. It troubled Orion far more than the thought that one day he might be taken captive somewhere. All he could do was remind himself that a vision could be no guarantee of a promised future.

An ache in his tanks was what forced him to stop and pull over at the dispensing station. To quiet them, he bought a slightly higher grade of energon than normal and sipped it slowly. While he drank, he chatted with a mech named Barricade - who was from Kaon, and who told him he looked like slag.

"You look like slag."

"I have not recharged well," Orion said as he nursed his cube. Noticing that Barricade didn't have one, he flagged the server over and bought him one.

"Y'know," Barricade said, glancing at him sideways, "I'm not a charity case."

Orion nodded. "I know."

"So, you headed to Kaon? Mechs mostly don't come this way unless they're headed to Kaon." Barricade tipped the cube back and drank half of it in one long pull.

"I am on leave from work," Orion said. "I decided I would go to Kaon and see the arena matches."

"Hn." Barricade grunted. "Dont take this wrong, but you don't seem like the kind of mech whose spike gets pressurized by that sort of sport."

"Good." It was the only response Orion could think of, and certainly the only one he could give without handing Barricade more information.

Barricade laughed and slapped his shoulder with a clang. "It's alright. That ain't a fuckin' bad thing." For a moment, he rummaged around in his subspace, then pulled out a red wafer of metal, stamped with the glyph for 'lantern'. With a flick of his wrist, he tossed it to Orion, who caught it.

Orion turned it over in his servos, expecting to find something on the back side, but the card was blank. "What's this?"

"In case the arena don't do it for you," Barricade said with a grin, "there's always the Floatin' Lantern. Dove will take good care of you."

It seemed rude to protest, so he thanked Barricade and took the card, sliding it into his subspace. Despite the hour, Barricade and his friends left to get back on the road (citing some kind of 'important business'), and Orion paid for a room at the station to try and recharge properly. Eventually he did, albeit restlessly. He tried not to think about Prowl laying next to him and how still the other mech was during recharge, but eventually he did that too.

In the morning, he set out and vowed to close the rest of the distance to Kaon without stopping. To his credit, he quite nearly made it. Another mech approached him, when he stopped at a bar to get fuel. The dispensing stations near Iacon were all friendly and well-lit. Some of them, the ones outside the range of the city's Enforcer patrols, even had private security. Now that he was ostensibly in Kaon (or rather, within Kaon's _territory_ , he was still outside the city itself), every energon outlet might have been called a dive. And that was only if the speaker was feeling charitable.

"Hey," the mech slid into the seat opposite him, and Orion gave him a steely look, allowing a measure of annoyance slip into his fields to let the other mech know his company wasn't wanted. Undaunted, he went on. "You a hauler?"

"No," Orion said, plainly. "An Enforcer."

It didn't get rid of the intruding mech as Orion had hoped it would. He doubted every mech in Kaon was a criminal, and even if they _were_ , he had no legal jurisdiction here - something that would still be true if he hadn't been on leave. Still, he had wrongly assumed they wouldn't want to attract any sort of official attention.

"Good, because I've got work, and I'm paying," he said. "And I'll pay more for an Enforcer."

"Neither my frame nor my time is for sale." Orion didn't like to use his size to intimidate, but he was larger than the other mech by degrees, and he leaned over him, trying to make him get the point. When he didn't, Orion ex-vented harshly and got up to leave.

"My convoy was attacked," he said. "Slaggers took half my goods before we drove them off."

That got Orion's attention, and he turned, sitting back down. "Did you report the attack to the proper authorities?"

"So then," the mech said, grinning, "you aren't an Enforcer from _Kaon_ , because if you were, you'd know there's no point."

"Surely there are authorities in Kaon."

"No _proper_ ones."

Orion kept his next expression of exasperation internal, and opened a file. There was nothing illegal about taking some notes and submitting them to the Kaon Enforcer Corps on another mech's behalf. "What were you moving?"

"Oh," said the mech, casually, as though it didn't matter, "drones."

Annoyance instantly turned over into dislike. Orion suddenly envied Prowl's ability to close himself off, and Ratchet had told him often enough that he showed to much in his face. It was far to late to snap his battlemask shut to hide his expression, and he couldn't suppress a grinding noise from his engines. "Moving drones to _where_?"

"To Iacon, grabbed them up just a few days ago. Some are new, some of them pre-owned. There's gonna be quite the market for them, considering the disaster they're having over there - you've seen the newsfeeds. Mechs are gonna want nurses, bodyguards, companions." He shrugged and glanced up at Orion. "I'm sensing you don't approve."

"Of trafficking in misery? No, I do not."

"Hey, hey." He held up one servo. "Maybe you should tell the mechs in Iacon that. Or Vos, or Praxus. They're the ones who buy 'em. If they didn't buy, no one would sell."

" _You_ , and mechs like you, are the ones creating an industry built on slavery, and an economy reliant on drone labor. Do not attempt pretend you are not also at fault." Orion felt his gears grind. He had never thought on it before, but was this how Prowl and Tumbler had come to Iacon? Chained in the darkness of a storage compartment and wondering who might buy them? And mechs who landed in the civil service were lucky - as drones went. The city still owned them, but they had limited rights - and they could retire during the second phase of their quinary life-cycle with a tiny pension.

The mech eyed him, suspicious. "I thought you were an Enforcer, not a Decepticon."

"Decepticon rhetoric tends to run slightly more heavy handed." Orion mentally snapped the file shut, though he noted the mech's face. "I apologize. I cannot help you. I have business in Kaon."

"Don't I know it," the mech snorted, but made no move to follow. "They're the ones who attacked us."

That, at least, got Orion's attention.

\------------

It didn't take much convincing to get one of the other haulers to tell him where the ambush had happened, and even though he had promised he wouldn't stray again, Orion drove out to see it. There wasn't much left, a few trailers turned on their sides, contents missing. Each one bore a hastily graffitied Decepticon brand on the side. Other than that, beyond a servoful of scorched marks and a few spatters of dried energon along the roadside, there was little evidence as to what had transpired. On the off chance that the Kaonite authorities might actually investigate, he did his best not to contaminate the scene, though he couldn't resist touching one of the blast marks with his fingertips.

 _Cold_. The mechs who had done this were long gone. Perhaps a day ahead into unfamiliar terrain.

It took him slightly longer to find the camp where the ambushers had lain in wait, but he managed to track the signs of the battle down the road to it. There wasn't much to see, a handful of discarded cubes and the crumpled packaging for what looked like homemade (and highly illegal) boltcaster rounds. Exposed to the baking sun and churning wind, the site wouldn't last long, and in the interest of protocol, Orion snapped off a few quick photographs.

There had been three mechs here. Cars, judging by their tire prints.

Three mechs against an entire convoy.

Not that size meant everything. He'd seen Prowl and Tumbler take down mechs twice their height, and while Ratchet was bigger and heaver than most cars, he wasn't a warrior by any stretch of the imagination. Still, haulers and big rigs were tough and durable, even if they had no combat upgrades. The cheapest and most common blasters available for sale to the pubic wouldn't even dent their plating unless the blast was directed and sustained.

From what he could tell, they had jumped an overpass, broken up the formation and run three of four of the haulers off the road by tipping their trailers. Such a thing could be retrieved and repaired, but not in the dead of night, and not while you were under attack. The convoy had cut its losses and run. Orion walked up and down the road twice, trying to recreate the scene in his mind. On his second pass, he looked for the boltcaster casings, and realized they hadn't fired a single shot. They'd used the boltcaster to short out whatever locking mechanism had been restraining the drones inside.

"Bearings of chrome steel," he said to no one in particular. This wasn't some random act of violence, perpetrated by venting mechs, it had been a planned attack. One that had been carefully measured and carried out with military precision.

Glancing towards Kaon, he wondered what he was getting himself into.


	6. The World-Conquering Warlord

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kaon's god damn lucky he didn't get his head ripped off after that attempt at verbally owning someone.

When he woke up, Overload was laying on his back and every part of his frame hurt.

His spark was the worst, the ache in his chest blossoming and receding, as though it was threatening to burst out of his chamber. At its worst, the agony made his head spin, and he would have fallen if he weren't already laying down. When he forced his optics open, his system reported a sixty-second delay before functionality could be restored. Overload groaned and raised his servos to rub his faceplates, only to find he was restrained.

Panic threatened to crush him, and for a moment, he felt the weight of his anchor chains, the press of the darkness, the coiling threat of the touch of one of his keepers. He could hear his own ventilations hitching, and he focused on them to calm himself down. Out of habit, he opened up the List and checked it. It was populated by the designations of tormentors he had never known, and they were all dead.

Overload cycled his ventilations and counted the seconds between them, feeling the threatening edge of panic start to dull. If he was restrained, it meant someone had fixed his arm, and if someone had fixed him, they must have a reason for keeping him alive. Sixty seconds passed, and his optics onlined, a mass of grey-black at first, but then slowly bringing the world into focus. He leaned up, going to the length of the restraints.

The world currently consisted of a small cell. There was a berth - on which he was restrained, and a stand with an energon drip attached to it. Laying in the far corner was a beastformer. Overload had never seen one up close, only in holovids, and this one looked like a cat of some kind. It was matte black and silver, and when it noticed he was awake, it yawned hugely and stretched itself out.

"Wait here," the cat said, as though Overload had some kind of choice in the matter. Before he could form a protest, it left the cell by contorting itself through the bars and sauntered off down the hallway, turning a corner and vanishing from sight.

He let his helm fall back to the berth with a light clang.

Alone now, he had nothing to do but speculate on who might have captured him. Memories of the merge were hazy and slow to form, he had jumped from the control room of an experimentation facility. A few more seconds of sorting out his memories informed him that he had not been a prisoner there.

No, that had been someone else--

The attack came then, energon oozing from his wrists as he squeezed his optics shut and yanked on the restraints, desperately trying to withdraw back into himself. Fear bled out into his fields, and if he'd had anything left, he would have flayed the room apart with lightning. Whoever had peeled him off the pavement had drained him completely, he had no charge left to speak of.

Worst of all was the desperate feeling of being hollowed out and powerless. His spark yearned for the other mech with a fervor and a black, bottomless depth of need that Overload hadn't known he was capable of. Now he was alone and at the mercy of unknown captors. It terrified him in a way that blotted out all rational thought.

Visions swirled behind his optics, his own memories, mixed with the memories of Experiment 5C.

He remembered killing Payroll, what he had done to him before the killing blow, and he purged. There wasn't enough give in the restraints to sit up and retch over the edge of the berth, so he expelled all over himself.

Something cool touched his forehead, soothing and calming his ragged fields, and he realized there was another mech standing over him.

What this mech looked like would have been difficult to say, because he had no face. A closed battlemask and a red visor hid any trace of features on his helm, and Overload couldn't make out anything that resembled seams, maybe they didn't open. Some drones were built without oral intakes, so they couldn't steal energon and had to rely on their owners to feed them. But this mech looked Forged, and Overload had never seen a Forged mech with no face. Cables attached to spinal ports retrieved a mesh cloth from his captor's subspace and wiped Overload down.

 _Soundwave_. Overload realized he knew the mech's name - knew him somehow, but how or why, he couldn't parse.

 _Fuck me, Primus_ , he thought. How long had the mech been standing there, lurking? _What a weirdo._

With one finger, Soundwave reached up and tapped the side of his helm.

"R-r-right," Overload said, and the sound that emerged from his abused vocalizer was less firm than he might have hoped. "You-- you're a telepath."

The inclination of Soundwave's helm was so slight as to be nearly imperceptible. He reached down and tapped one of the restraints. "Behave."

Overload nodded to him, and Soundwave opened the cuff, leaving the other one attached. It wasn't much, but it allowed him to sit up and swing his legs off the berth. The slightest movement felt like a great effort, but he was determined to get himself under control.

For a moment, he wondered what exactly Soundwave expected him to _do_ , but he abruptly realized that blowing up the building and killing hundreds of mechs in a three-day rampage wasn't entirely out of the question.

"Thousands," Soundwave said, correcting him. He continued wiping down the berth, as though the death count was inconsequential to him. His voice had a mechanical, monotone quality to it. Like a sparkling who had never learned to speak properly. The aura of menace combined with a voice normally associated with immature or adolescent mechs gave the whole interaction a surreal quality. "Township Array destroyed to conceal evidence of Site 5C's existence."

Overload felt his tanks churn, and he came close to purging again. He wondered if that would count as a failure to behave. "I didn't do that!"

Soundwave did not acknowledge the protest, and apparently satisfied with his cleaning efforts, withdrew the cloths into subspace.

"Where am I?" Overload asked at last, watching Soundwave warily, but his body language was impossible to read. The bizzare mech didn't _have_ any, and his fields were pulled in to near nothingness.

"Kaon."

"How did I get here?"

"Disabled and retrieved by Decepticon agents."

"Where is he?"

"Stasis. Another site."

"So then, imprisoned again? I want to see him."

"Impossible. Isolation currently deemed necessary. Unified form unstable. Dangerous to yourself, others."

Overload rolled his optics. "Are you always this talkative?"

"Affirmative."

"I want to leave."

"Negative. Megatron's permission required."

 _Megatron_. He knew that name too, though like Soundwave, he wasn't sure _how_. Overload ex-vented, harshly, and tilted his helm up towards what he guessed was optic contact with Soundwave. "Fine, then _get_ me Megatron's permission. The last time he was being held prisoner at a seperate site and I had to go looking for him didn't go so well for anyone, did it?"

"Precautions taken--"

"Soundwave," another voice cut him off, "that's enough. Thank you."

Later, when he called himself Kaon, he would often hear Decepticons speak about how they had met Megatron, how he had had rescued or freed them. How he had taught them how to read or how to fight. How he had given the means to rescue others. How handsome or charismatic or inspiring he was. How they would do anything for him. The details of some first fateful meeting, recalled fondly. Tarn would secretly come to love such stories.

Not _publicly_ , of course. Because Tarn's (and to some extent, the rest of the Division's) public persona was a work of art, finely turned and crafted to provoke fear and respect. It largely worked, Soundwave and Sunbeam knew exactly what they were doing. All of Tarn's diversions, other than his love of music, had to remain strictly private. The fact that he liked adventure novels, energon jellies, and preferred certain interfacing positions were practically state secrets.

Privately though, and Soundwave would collect the conversations and send them to Tarn, who would spend hours listening to them.

Not that such sparkwarming tales would keep you off the List. Oh _no_. Tarn even seemed to get a perverse satisfaction of playing the recordings back to his imminently deceased victims.

...and Overload would never tell Tarn his own story, because he had been thinking about killing the mech.

There was no denying that Megatron was handsome, so much so that he seemed to soak up all the attention in the room. The moment he passed through the door to the cell, Overload's optics were drawn to him, and he forgot Soundwave was there. Later, he would learn it was a tactic they used, refined and well-practiced. Presence in absence.

The future Emperor was tall, and his powerful fields and arresting presence made him seem even taller. Larger than life. From where he sat, Overload would have guessed Megatron was fully twice his height, though as it would turn out, not quite. He was almost solid grey, with internal purple biolights. Clawed hands with no seams, they didn't retract - and perhaps he intended it that way. Red optics, for commoners who needed low-light vision. 

"I want to see him." Overload repeated his earlier demand, for want of anything else to say.

Megatron nodded to him. "I want to let you, but understand, I can't allow another rampage." His tone was patient, almost friendly, and he plucked something out of his subspace and held it up. It was Redcap's badge. "Where did you get this? It isn't yours."

His spark twisted, and he wondered how Megatron could _know_ that. Maybe he didn't. Maybe it was a bluff. "It belonged to my friend. She gave it to me. She thought it would protect me."

"And so it has." The badge vanished back into subspace.

"She also said the Decepticons didn't make house calls."

"We don't, but your cry for help was particularly persuasive." Megatron took a step closer, and his fields enveloped the room. Overload wouldn't so much say that clashed with his as they completely blotted them out. The mech might as well have been the only other being on Cybertron. He felt smaller than he was.

"I want to see him," Overload said, pleading this time. "You can't keep him locked up. You don't know what was done to him."

"I have some idea, but he's dangerous. To himself. To you. To my other followers." Megatron gestured with one servo. "Power needs to be tempered and guided by restraint. Your combined form was a creature formed entirely of id. You would have destroyed yourselves if Soundwave hadn't intervened."

"I can make him understand."

"Good," said Megatron. "Because we were all counting on that."

\------------

They walked and talked. Overload tolerated it because if it kept his...

The right words to describe the mech from 5C and their relationship wouldn't form, but if it would keep him safe, he could handle some light conversation. He told Megatron everything had happened before. About the Array and lotteries, how the drones were being taken and fed to the other mech to keep him quiet, and to extract the power from his voice.

Soundwave walked behind them, and Overload found he had to concentrate to remember that the other mech was there.

Megatron listened without interruption, waiting for a pause. He was something of a good conversationalist, Overload had to give him that. "...and once it was extracted, what then?"

"That part's harder. Those are his memories, not mine."

"Do try."

"Underneath the facility..." Overload folded his servos over one another and gripped them. He would have rather not looked so nervous, but he couldn't help himself. He rebooted his vocalizer and started again. "Under the facility, they had the corpse of the Patropolus who was killed during the voidquake. Diamondback."

"Kaia," said Megatron, "was the name of of the city, but go on."

"He has... some sort of psychic power."

"Senate experiments on outliers continue." Soundwave's voice almost startled Overload, and he glanced back. "Disturbing."

"So it would appear," Megatron said. "How did they find him?"

"I know it doesn't make any sense, but... the Prime-- Sentinel _made_ him. Or, at least, somehow he called him up out of the Well for this specific purpose. To extract power from his voice, so they could restore Patropolus back to a... semblance of life and use it as a weapon." The explanation felt hopelessly lame, but Megatron nodded, as though it made perfect sense.

"There are others," he said.

"Others like him?"

"None _like_ him, but others. The Judge-General, Tyrest. Malleus' old consort, Ratchet."

Overload knew, if vaguely, who the Judge-General was. He'd heard his name a few times on news feeds. Tyrest was the highest ranking Cybertronian who wasn't one of the Primes, the planet's chief judge and lawmaker. The other name he didn't recognize, but curiosity would have to wait. "What's going to happen to him?"

"He needs help. Until he gets it, he needs to stay in stasis."

They came to a doorway, and then out into a courtyard. The glare of the sun nearly blinded Overload as they passed though. He was used to being indoors, and other than the sheltered walk between the habs and the Array, Overload had probably only spent a handful of hours outdoors in his entire life. He blinked his optics furiously, trying to adjust, not that there was anything noteworthy to see. It was all grey stone and jagged edges. Everything seemed to covered in a fine layer of grime, and the harsh sunlight made the smog that blanketed the city even more obvious. Mechs were milling about, and they all gave Megatron a wide berth.

"I won't let you hold him captive again," Overload said, squaring his shoulders and trying to sound determined. It didn't help, Megatron had all the power here and he knew it. "He's suffered more than you know."

"It's not up for debate," Megatron said, his tone steely, but patient. "But if you want to help him, you can help me."

"Help you what?" Overload felt the rein he had on his annoyance slip, his grip on it always to light. "You want to be Emperor? And you want to stand on the shoulders of the drones to reach the throne?"

Megatron stopped walking, looking down at Overload. The weight of his gaze and his fields felt like a sledgehammer, but Overload refused to shrink away. He was so much taller that Overload had to tilt his chin up to make optic contact. Primus only knew how much more he weighed. One careless blow from the silver mech's fist would have been the end of him. He wanted to run, but he didn't. "You want us to fight for you, is that it?"

"No," Megatron said. His chuckle was throaty, deep. Amused. "Not quite. I have all the warriors I need, but I have something else in mind."

"Then," Overload said, "maybe there's something else I could do. I could tell you how to sabotage the an Array. The power outage, you benefited from that, didn't you? I could help you do that, and you could let us go."

"You're presuming quite a lot, R-6625."

"I know the names of the mechs who were running Site 5C, and the Director, I know his face. I could find him for you." Overload was glad, suddenly, that Megatron's fields blotted out everything else. It masked the desperation he was sure was flickering through his own. "I could do that. We could trade."

Megatron reached over and pressed one claw into the soft cabling of Overload's chin, holding his helm in place. The threat implicit. "I have spies, far more capable ones by far."

"If you've already got all these warriors, and saboteurs, and spies, then you don't need us, _do_ you, _Emperor_?" Overload's fists clenched, and he willed himself to stay in place, perilous as it was.

The look on Megatron's faceplates told him that the mech was not used to being conversationally outmaneuvered. Seconds crawled by, and Overload expected each one to be the one when that claw punched through his main intake.

...and then he laughed. His other servo came up, the claw vanished, and he patted Overload on the cheek. "See, you _do_ have something they don't have. No wonder he likes you."

Overload flinched away. "I haven't said yes yet."

"Ah, but you're going to hear me out, aren't you?" Megatron smiled, and like the mech who had been running the lottery at the Array, all his denta were pointed. "That's good enough for now."

\------------

Pharma didn't like Perceptor, so Drift decided immediately that he did.

So far, the microscope had maintained a near-constant stream of conversation since Pharma had brought him around from stasis. It was remarkable to watch, and Perceptor barely stopped to cycle his ventilations. Drift had come over to listen, and at the minibot's insistence, he had detached Flashback and sat him down next to the medical berth where Perceptor was confined. He'd immediately started carrying on a separate conversation in hand-signs with the broken little dataslate.

Pharma was there too, arms crossed and fields swirling in agitation. Every time he'd tried to extricate himself, Perceptor would jab the 'call' button on the berth until one the nurses brought him back.

The nurses themselves were a new feature at the clinic. Pharma had bought four of them, brand new H-Series drones, polished white, expensive, and top of the line. Ratchet was frail, was his excuse, and he would need new assistants once he came out of stasis. Personally, Drift thought that Pharma just didn't want to do the grunt work of running the clinic - though he didn't dare say so. Before, all the cleaning, disinfecting, inventory, and heavy lifting had been done by Ratchet and Knock Out - sometimes with help from Joyride and him.

Something told him that Ratchet would not approve of owning mechs he likely wouldn't be able to emancipate - which was his intention with Joyride, but it wasn't Drift's battle to fight.

"Pharma!" Perceptor called, reaching over to pat Drift's thigh and signing one-handed to Flashback. "Look at how young Drift is! Are you a little jealous, hmmm? Maybe Ratchet is finally getting over his fixation on naughty jets and developing a proper fetish for racers like the rest of us, and you're getting on in sweeps, aren't you?"

Drift flushed and Pharma rolled his optics. "Says the mech in quarternary life-cycle."

"Ha! Right you are about that. Why, I was hardly older than Drift when Ratchet and I first met! That old bastard is going to outlive all of us, mark my words. Primus' bearings, look at him blushing!"

"I'm starting to regret keeping you for observation," Pharma said, his tone cool. "Helm injury or not. I don't even know why they brought you here, instead of to an _actual_ hospital."

"Oh well, you know, Ratchet is my doctor, and of course, when it's something embarrassing I left instructions with my staff to bring me to him. Bollocks! Can you imagine if they saw me in that state in an emergency room?"

Pharma raised an eyeridge. "You mean unconscious and covered in someone else's energon and transfluid?"

"It would hardly be the first time," Perceptor said, grinning, and then winking salaciously at Drift, "but yes, essentially. I mean, I couldn't very well be brought into a public hospital looking like a ten-shanix buymech, could I?"

"Oh, Percy," said Pharma. "Don't be so hard on yourself, you look like at least a twenty-shanix buymech."

"Ha! And they say Vosians have no sense of humor!"

"Enough." That statement might as well have been correct, because any good humor was rapidly draining out of Pharma's fields. "You're fine. I'm releasing you and calling a transport. Go home."

"What? Now?" Perceptor shook his helm. "Pharma, I can't possibly leave without my drone. Not when he's in such a condition. Pharma, he's not _well_."

Pharma's optics flicked over Flashback and Drift saw the greenish blink of a medical scan. "What are you talking about? He's fine, other than his speech center and long-term memory. Nearly perfect health."

"Pharma, don't be an ignorant piece of shareware. You know I mean the poor little fellow who got thrown from the Palace Wall."

"You're kidding."

"I can't possibly leave until I know he's going to be alright." Perceptor settled down and gazed defiantly up at the jet. The microscope was, Drift decided, either completely crazy or in a very high caste. Mechs who talked back to the nobility were taking their sparks in their servos. Pharma was all but above the law, only the Primes and a handful of nobles outranked him.

Later, he would learn it was a little bit of both.

"Drift," Perceptor went on. "Go and get me a pillow. If we're waiting for Pharma to pull his helm out of his aft, it might be a long wait. And I'd hate to see you go, but I'd love to watch you leave."

Drift's face felt hot, and he was sure his protoflesh was turning blue from all the energon running to it. He wished Knock Out were here, but he'd dropped Drift off at the clinic and then headed to the Academy. Knock Out had made it clear that he trusted Drift to be alone in his apartment, but he wanted to go to the clinic and make sure Pharma didn't do anything untoward to Ratchet. What exactly Drift was going to do the jet if he tried something, he didn't know. He eased off the stool next to the berth and slipped out, the door hissing closed behind him.

The moment it did, Pharma and Perceptor stopped glitching and yelling at each other, and all Drift could hear was hushed tones - as though they had suddenly become partners and co-conspirators. Somehow, it made him feel left out. Fighting down the urge to lean into the door and listen, he walked down the hall of the clinic until he found a storage room with some roughly made, but serviceable, bedding.

By the time he got back, Pharma had gone, and Perceptor was reading from a dataslate. Flashback was still sitting with him, and he raised his arms to Drift, who let him attach.

"I brought you the pillow," he said, holding it up.

"Hmmm? Oh, yes. Of course you did. Just put it down there, love."

Drift set the pillow down next to the bed and sat back down. The air in the room felt off. Something wasn't right. "Knock Out... he told me about you."

Perceptor rested one arm across his lap and tilted his helm up. "Did he now?"

"He said you were a professor at the Academy, and... uh... also a witch?"

"Tosh!" Perceptor rolled his optics. "He has no idea what he's talking about. Thank Primus he got into medicine and not mathematics. Less chance of him hurting himself that way."

"Okay, but I--"

"Knock Out can't tell the difference between his aft and a hole in the ground, you think he knows anything about sorcery?"

"So then you _are_ a witch? I mean, I don't want to be rude, but aren't all witches--" He cut himself off. Perceptor was giving him a look that he probably normally used to peel paint, all trace of his good humor gone. "Haven't they all had empurata done to them?"

"Drift," Perceptor said with a low ex-vent, "don't use the word 'witch', it's offensive, and no. You can plainly see that's not true with your own optics. There is at least one sorcerer who isn't an empurata victim. Two, if you count High Senator Shockwave."

"So then," Drift tried to conceal his eagerness, and failed, "can you show me some magic? Anything, even something small?"

"They always ask." Perceptor pinched the bridge of his nose. "Drift, darling. Sorcerers don't fly around or shoot fireballs at people or talk to dragons. Unless they're jets, or flamethrowers, I suppose. And there are no dragons left on Cybertron anyways. Most magic, virtually all of it, is _highly_ delicate lab work."

Disappointment gnawed at him. He should have known it wouldn't be like it was in holovids, and yet somehow he felt cheated. "Lab work?"

"Yes, darling, lab work. You see there are..." Perceptor paused. "Well, for simplicity's sake, let's call them 'back doors' hard coded into the laws of physics, and some mechs have the unique gifts and foresight required to recognize them. It's hardly spectacular. Extending the range of a space bridge, generating enough power to induce artificial ignition in a drone's spark, or coming up with the alchemical process for synthetic protoflesh are hardly material for the next fantasy holovid epic."

"Oh." It was all Drift could think of to say. 

"It's also why empurata victims tend to display such a fantastical rate of sorcerous awakenings - compared to the general population anyways. Their view of the universe is narrowed right down. Razor sharp. But still, sorry to disappoint. Why did you ask? Just curiosity, then?"

"I was," Drift said, feeling himself flush again, "it feels stupid now, but I was hoping maybe you could teach me."

"No. I can't."

"Not even something simple? Just to see if I get--"

"Drift." Perceptor crossed his arms, and his fields abruptly grew so cold that Drift swore the temperature of the room changed. "No. Because you're an addict. Because you only want to learn because you're worried there's nothing interesting about you. Because you think if there's nothing special about you, Knock Out will kick you out of his apartment. And _Knock Out_ is not the sort of mech you should be worrying about impressing. What Ratchet sees in him, I have no idea. Probably something that isn't there, just like he does with _you_. You're never going to amount to anything, least of all being a sorcerer. Now, if you could, leave."

He felt thin. Hollow and transparent, like Perceptor had cut right through him to what he had always known about himself. The chair scraped the floor as he jerked away from the berth.

...and then he ran.

\------------

\-- focusingIris [FI] sent causticChirurgeon [CC] a message! --

FI: There.  
FI: It's done.  
FI: I got rid of the poor little sparkling for you.  
FI: Terrible business, just terrible. And I quite liked him too.  
CC: I bet you did.  
FI: I hope you're happy, Pharma.  
CC: To be perfectly honest, I don't care either way.  
CC: ...but Ratchet wouldn't have wanted them involved and neither of them would get the hint if I attached it to their faceplates with surgical staples.  
FI: I daresay, you're right.  
FI: No need to strongarm _me_ into doing your dirty work, though.  
CC: No need for _me_ to do twenty hours of surgery on a critically injured drone who's going to offline anyways, but we all have to make sacrifices.  
FI: Indeed we do.  
FI: Now, tell me where Prowl and Wheeljack have gotten off to and go on a bit about this nonsense business with secret Primes.


End file.
